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Among my gripes is that not only does no one care that I've studied Knuth, it is uncommon for those who might hire me, to have even heard of Knuth. Consider th

Among my gripes is that not only does no one care that I've studied Knuth, it is uncommon for those who might hire me, to have even heard of Knuth. Consider that Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to start facebook. Now he has the idea that he knows more about computer programming than I do, despite the fact that I had been in the industry for six years before he was even born. I'm working on an iOS version of Conway's Game of Life. The vast majority of hiring managers I demonstrate my app to, not only have never heard of Conway's Life, they don't have a clue about cellular automata - nor do they see the point of my app. I find that hard to understand, as Conway's Life is a widely studied artificial intelligence research tool.

dalke 12y ago
It's like this for every single subject. Griping about the ignorance of others is awfully hard to distinguish from boasting about your superiority. For the vast majority of problems, knowing Knuth is about as useful as being able to quote Tacitus, compose a Petrarchan sonnet, describe the Krebs cycle, or recount the details of Australia's 1882 victory at The Oval. You would have had the same blank look if you demonstrated your microkernel operating system, LALR parser, or Needleman–Wunsch-based sequence alignment tool. Why should they care? If you can't explain to them why it's important, then perhaps it actually isn't important for the job. My previous comment objected to the idea that people should be rejected solely because they know esoteric knowledge. Your gripe seems to be that uncommon knowledge makes someone somehow special. You'll get no empathy from me.