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This is beautiful, and horrifying. A cleverly written tale around some deep magic. And yet. Who among you would hire this witch? Who among you would want to m
by egypturnash 7y ago
This is beautiful, and horrifying. A cleverly written tale around some deep magic.
And yet.
Who among you would hire this witch? Who among you would want to maintain this kind of code, should this witch move on to challenges more suited to her skills?
Who among you would dare to meddle with the work of a Real Programmer[1]?
1: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
- vnorilo 7y agoI think anyone would be a fool to NOT hire her and NOT treat her like a dangerous, high energy combustible material.
- pjc50 7y agoIt should not be taken too literally. Part of the context is how asking this type of puzzle question with a simple expected solution is trivialising to smart programmers; part of it is the question of how many places cargo-cult difficult interviews because google do it that way but then expect people to work on CRUD apps with little originality or autonomy. It would indeed be a disaster to hire someone like this for that job. On the other hand, there are places where this kind of thing would fit right in: exploit writing, games development, certain kinds of HPC, cryptography, some firmware development. And it demonstrates the kind of deep understanding where being able to read this kind of thing is very useful to puzzle out some horrendous low-level mess that has been inflicted on you by a vendor. If it was John Carmack or Richard Feynman doing it, it would be celebrated. The risk with "rockstars" is they do this stuff when you don't want them to. Codewitches are much rarer, and have a much better sense of when it's a good idea. Neither is ever really going to be a "team player" but can deliver amazing things.