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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

Cue the circus of people who argue over the contents of this list, despite having actually used the learnings from books only in job interviews.

There are so many developers (like your peers at work) who have literally read none of these books. In a Darwinian sense, isn't that evidence that there's nothing so special about these texts for what you do?

Skip the books and just memorize what's on Interview Cake. I love that site. It so brilliantly subverts the academic pretensions of every industrial software development shop.

So many people will have memorized so precisely the solutions to programming test questions that they stop being useful. Engineering managers will be unable to come up with novel questions, because they will have no benchmarks. Then the madness will end: Computer Science will get less popular in university again, and this notion that these Gospels have All the Answers will go away.

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I genuinely feel bad for people who have only used the learnings from these books in job interviews.

Either they've never had to work on a really Hard Problem, or worse they have tried to solve such a problem without the hard-won lessons present in these books.

> a really Hard Problem

I've heard senior recruiters express skepticism about candidates who say they're into "Hard Problems." Experienced engineering managers usually hear that phrase when you're looking for a lifestyle and you don't really care what the application is.

For example, "I have no qualms that your business arbitrages nonconverting clicks from bots and sketchy web traffic (i.e., 99% of the Internet) into Google AdWords revenue, using up a Google customer's ad budget until the customer has barely made a profit... You see, I'm into Hard Problems. Besides, bots don't click twice! It must be real traffic!"

It turns out that junior people on the interview team care a lot more about Hard Problems and the stories in these books than senior people do. And you'd never want your hiring pipeline run by junior people.

In my opinion, Google's focus on Hard Problems has robbed academia of all the sincere Hard Problems people. Then, they've ruined the interview process for everyone else, ironically with the book How Google Works, convincing CEOs that they should be asking about C.S. fundamentals and Hard Problems totally unrelated to their Actual Problems.

To me the funny thing is the small companies with 2-3 developers hiring like they are google with interviews over the course of weeks, with google/amazon-like gauntlets. You aren't google, you aren't paying google-level salaries, why are you pretending you are.

That said, I happen to like problems in general... not necessarily "hard" problems, but just new problems. I also like working in new domains... I mean what other industry of work allows you to work in education, aerospace, banking, security and marketing in a decade and a half.

> To me the funny thing is the small companies with 2-3 developers hiring like they are google with interviews over the course of weeks, with google/amazon-like gauntlets.

Hmm. Arguably small operations need to be more stringent if they are deciding who will make up the next 25%-33% of their engineering workforce. At small companies one bad hire can really poison the well.

True, but they'd probably be better with a hire/fire fast attitude than draw out the interview process... Interviews take time away from the people doing the interviews that can be spent doing other things... do you really want to allocate more than half your company for weeks vs. getting stuff done.

I mean, have a trial period of a week or three... That will tell you far more than a gauntlet interview process with a lot of false negatives.

For me, as a CEO, hire/fire fast is definitely more costly than a well-designed interview "gauntlet"

Before starting my own company I was a bar raiser at Amazon. Interviews were not supposed to last weeks (though many did and there were internal metrics aimed at driving interview to offer cycle time down).

I'd much rather spend a few hours per interviewer per candidate getting a solid candidate than hiring, onboarding, training, learning the candidate is a poor fit, and ultimately going through the not-fun-for-anyone firing process.

High turnover isn't worth the lost productivity from other employees or the hit to morale. On top of that, while learning whether or not the candidate will make it through the trial, you're burning precious cash.

Learn how to interview and teach your people how to interview. It will save you heartache and money.

But do whiteboard exercises that consist of concepts that someone is unlikely to ever touch really count for the quality of code one is likely to output?

Especially when many of those concepts necessitate code that is less than discoverable, well documented and easy to follow?

A 3 week trial period is a far longer than an Amazon interview sequence.

For one person.. not for a few dozen... It's easy enough to pick the apparent best from the available pool much faster.

Also, there's the cost of existing staff in interviews... if you only have 2-3 devs, and you're keeping them all in interviews with multiple candidates, you're not getting work done.

""I have no qualms that your business arbitrages nonconverting clicks from bots and sketchy web traffic (i.e., 99% of the Internet) into Google AdWords revenue, using up a Google customer's ad budget until the customer has barely made a profit."

Can you explain what this business model is and how the arbitrage works? Is this SEO gaming? Thanks

Some people don't care about working in hard problems. They're fine with their Java/.NET CRUD job where you only need domain knowledge and a best practices book.

A large part of the job market has little need for those kind of books.

There's a really small set of programmers who actually need to work on hard problems. The rest of the world just needs their business logic implemented.

Upvote for Interview Cake, that website has been more helpful than most of my CS courses.

I just did the first three problems on Interview Cake. They didn't seem much different from the easy problems on something like Topcoder or Codeforces. Maybe people should just take a moment to solve some of those. Those two also have great communities to help new people.

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