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This joke doesn't get the point: computer science is one of the few areas where one person can solve a problem literally one million times as fast as another, i

This joke doesn't get the point: computer science is one of the few areas where one person can solve a problem literally one million times as fast as another, if you measure in running time. You don't get those kinds of productivity differentials in driving. Moreover, access to the latest and greatest tech is a click away and costs nothing. If you were a professional driver and could click in your spare time to be in the driver's seat of a Ferrari or tank for free, of course you'd do it if you cared at all about your craft. Finally, the hours and wages of computer scientists are obviously far better, so more demands in a CV are reasonable. At best this is a sendup of the Craigslist naifs looking to build an FB killer at $15/hour...but I get the sense he's saying that employers shouldn't be so demanding. Yet it is peers rather than employers who've set that standard, as there actually are a fairly substantial number of people who can do frontend and backend, full stack. They're called hackers.

there 15y ago
computer science is one of the few areas where one person can solve a problem literally one million times as fast as another, if you measure in running time. i'm not sure what you're arguing. that a professional programmer could optimize a program to be a million times faster than an unskilled programmer? or that the program would run a tiny bit faster but over the life of the program running continuously, it would do a million times more work? a professional racecar driver racing around a circuit could finish a lap 10 seconds faster than an unskilled driver. over the course of a 24-hour endurance race, those 10 seconds would add up to a lot of time.
- ramanujan 15y ago
  Well, in driving, the ultimate time ratio would not be a million fold or even close, even taken over the entire lifetimes of driver 1 and 2. An extreme differential would be 10X. There are a few different ways to formulate the comparison in CS. For simplicity, consider a one-time eigenvalue computation on a large matrix (used for Pagerank and many other things). You could measure the total time from sitting down at the computer to having the numbers flow out onto the monitor. Let's consider the ratio of total time taken by skilled programmer one vs. unskilled programmer two. The first obvious point is that many unskilled programmers wil not even be able to formulate the problem, leading to a ratio of infinity (i.e. any solution by programmer one will be infinitely faster than no solution). Contrast to the driving example. Legions of smart engineers have made driving as simple as turning a key. So driver one and two will both be able to get started. You can continue the analogy. As the size of the matrix gets larger, some programmer twos will get bogged down in trying to compute every eigenvalue, while programmer one uses something like the Arnoldi-Lanczos algorithm to pull out only the ones they need. Depending on matrix size this can quickly become literally one million times as fast as the naive solution. This is not a theoretical example, but very similar to the tech behind Kaltix, one of Google's first acquisitions. It's not too hard to find many more examples. Moreover, this is for just one problem; when accumulated over time as in the hypothetical driver comparison, the ratios get even greater.
ultrasaurus 15y ago
There are two very different hiring processes for developers, companies with competent technical people with authority can test applicants (and read their github) and hire on that basis. But if a company isn't comfortable/capable of measuring someone's abilities, it's easy to get caught in a spiral of lax recruiters, exaggerated resumes and skill creep.

there 15y ago

computer science is one of the few areas where one person can solve a problem literally one million times as fast as another, if you measure in running time. i'm not sure what you're arguing. that a professional programmer could optimize a program to be a million times faster than an unskilled programmer? or that the program would run a tiny bit faster but over the life of the program running continuously, it would do a million times more work? a professional racecar driver racing around a circuit could finish a lap 10 seconds faster than an unskilled driver. over the course of a 24-hour endurance race, those 10 seconds would add up to a lot of time.

ramanujan 15y ago
Well, in driving, the ultimate time ratio would not be a million fold or even close, even taken over the entire lifetimes of driver 1 and 2. An extreme differential would be 10X. There are a few different ways to formulate the comparison in CS. For simplicity, consider a one-time eigenvalue computation on a large matrix (used for Pagerank and many other things). You could measure the total time from sitting down at the computer to having the numbers flow out onto the monitor. Let's consider the ratio of total time taken by skilled programmer one vs. unskilled programmer two. The first obvious point is that many unskilled programmers wil not even be able to formulate the problem, leading to a ratio of infinity (i.e. any solution by programmer one will be infinitely faster than no solution). Contrast to the driving example. Legions of smart engineers have made driving as simple as turning a key. So driver one and two will both be able to get started. You can continue the analogy. As the size of the matrix gets larger, some programmer twos will get bogged down in trying to compute every eigenvalue, while programmer one uses something like the Arnoldi-Lanczos algorithm to pull out only the ones they need. Depending on matrix size this can quickly become literally one million times as fast as the naive solution. This is not a theoretical example, but very similar to the tech behind Kaltix, one of Google's first acquisitions. It's not too hard to find many more examples. Moreover, this is for just one problem; when accumulated over time as in the hypothetical driver comparison, the ratios get even greater.

ultrasaurus 15y ago

There are two very different hiring processes for developers, companies with competent technical people with authority can test applicants (and read their github) and hire on that basis. But if a company isn't comfortable/capable of measuring someone's abilities, it's easy to get caught in a spiral of lax recruiters, exaggerated resumes and skill creep.