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It's good that the author prepared him or herself so thoroughly, but in my experience, someone like Tom Cook would not waste time asking a new candidate how to
by neilk 16y ago
It's good that the author prepared him or herself so thoroughly, but in my experience, someone like Tom Cook would not waste time asking a new candidate how to scale Facebook. That's like preparing for your interview with NASA by studying how they built the Space Shuttle. They know you aren't going to have experience there.
What they want are people who understand the fundamentals of how the computer and the OS works, who can diagnose problems correctly, who know modern sysadmin tools. They can teach you the ins and outs of their macro-scale systems on the job.
- gridspy 16y agoTo expand on your point, They aren't looking for people who know the current bleeding edge (in scaling, say). Instead they need people who can continue to define the future bleeding edge.
- varjag 16y agoWho are usually the same people.
- dagw 16y agoMore likely a subset. Just because you can read up on what other people have done and implement their ideas, doesn't mean you can come up with your own, better, ideas.
- varjag 16y agoI don't know. Taking in the context of this discussion, it would mean someone with vigor and no understanding of basic CS concepts can come up with breakthrough in distributed computing. This is in spite of tens of thousands smart people who actually know the stuff and been researching it for years standing where they are now. Just does not sound very probable. EIDT: OK it's not quite what you've been arguing about. Yes, not everyone familiar with the field is going to ever push the envelope. My point was that the chance of an outsider there is quite small.
- dagw 16y agoI think that was my point. Understanding the cutting edge within the field is necessary, but in no ways sufficient, to have what it takes to push the envelope. And if you need to hire someone to push the envelope then you need to look beyond simply what they know when hiring.
- neilk 16y agoThis doesn't make any sense to me. You can't take a shortcut around understanding the systems as they are now. Also, it's not clear to me that in this case they were even trying to find someone to be so bleeding-edge. They also need sysadmins to do other kinds of work -- fight fires, deal with adding servers, handle local IT, administer testing environments, and so on. If they are looking at people with the OP's background I'd hazard it was more about the latter.