4 ms·

And people need to distinguish between "can't describe the boot sequence in detail", or "doesn't know SQL registers" and someone who may very well be a producti

• lisasays 4y ago
  And the fun part is - everyone (who favors this aggressive interview tactic) seems to have their own set of shibboleth definitions which -- for them -- are magical tells as to whether someone is bozo / plodder or not. For some, it's the boot sequence of a PC. For others, it's the Liskov Substitution Principle. For others, it might precise definitions of all the database transaction or normalization levels. That is - pieces of genuinely useful knowledge, to be sure. Stuff we probably should have been exposed to at least once. But also stuff that, once we've gotten the basic point - is easy to slip out of our muscle memory over the years. Especially as we end up doing, you know, real work for real people. And we start to develop genuine technical horse sense that goes beyond the ability to memorize (and retain for years and years) zillions of verbal definitions for things.
  • sleepybrett 4y ago
    I want to be clear, i've hired several engineers who don't know how computers actually work. It's fine, there are certain optimization tasks I would probably assign to someone else maybe to pair with the less educated engineer, but other than that the code they are working on is so absurdly abstracted from the metal it really doesn't matter that much.