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I typically don’t trust anyone who uses the word “coding”.

• swyx 6y ago
  naming is hard... so the background on this is that the book was originally called "Cracking the Coding Career" for the alliteration and for the mirror with "Cracking the Coding Interview". I nearly even shipped with that name - until Gayle McDowell got in touch and said this would break her trademark. So I had to tweak it. I considered maybe a dozen other names but believe it or not they were worse :(
  • jayrice257 6y ago
    Naming is hard when you have to rely on marketing and gimmicks to sell an idea instead of content... like this "book"
  • closeparen 6y ago
    Gayle's usage, "coding interview," specifies which part of the interview loop her book focuses on. Of course there are many other attributes and skills assessed in an interview loop: design, architecture, debugging, technical communication, experience, domain knowledge, leadership, etc. The usage of "coding" with respect to the job often comes off as a polemic against those other facets. Sometimes this is what you want! Maybe you're breaking free of all that architecture astronomy and faux-agile BS to just build stuff. Maybe you're differentiating yourself from your senior colleagues who seem to write only documents. Maybe you want to hire someone to shut up and type, not pester you about tech debt. But these are all fighting words. It gets old when people pick up this usage and repeat it without even meaning it.