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Not the person you're responding to, but my perspective is that there is often a false equivalency between academic understanding (solving hard/clever problems)
by alpha_squared 6y ago
Not the person you're responding to, but my perspective is that there is often a false equivalency between academic understanding (solving hard/clever problems) and productive development (meeting deadlines, building/fixing projects). Many of the stereotypical developer interviews assume "good developers" who are good at one are good at the other. My anecdotal experience is that most are not, they excel in one or the other.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Olreich 6y agoI don’t think they are exclusive, you can be a great engineer that knows all about the algorithms in CS books and keeps up on the latest research in parts of the academic field. They aren’t even different skill sets, just different places to find the knowledge. Game development and cryptography bear this out well. The top engineers are the ones that read all the papers and that can build solid systems based on them.
- alpha_squared 6y agoI don't think I framed it as exclusive, but that the intersection of both sets of skills is uncommon (I attest they are two different sets). Sure, you can aim to hire only people who excel in both, but the typical software interview certainly doesn't assess the latter.