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Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

Not sure about your examples. I mean, when working as a programmer, we encounter tons of things we've never heard before but we do the research, we study what's needed to complete the task and we complete the task... e.g. it is quite easy to search about audio recognition - you encounter fingerprint, then you do the research...

Your examples make sense when you're isolated on some island without a connectivity, but that's not the case usually.

Also, I think companies like Shazam have separate people/teams in "science/research department" and "engineering department".

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It‘s easy to google how Shazam works now, since they exist.

I‘m pretty sure that googling for „audio fingerprint“ or „algorithm for recognizing a song“ wouldn‘t have gotten you the answer in 2002.

You need to know the maths if you want to invent something new. If you just want to reimplement existing stuff, maybe you can get away without it.

(Inventing new stuff is actually pretty rare for programmers. I don‘t think I‘ve actually invented much, despite having worked as a software developer for more than 15 years...)

People tend to underestimate the age of working knowledge a lot.

Shazam wasn't an original invention, similar things were implemented in hardware in the 80s, and original research in this area done even much earlier.

Sure, though, as you go back in time, the probability that the environment you could get exposed to that knowledge in overlaps with academic circles probably increases.

Seriously, consider that the PARC people were working on perceptrons decades before they became truly feasible. There is almost always prior art to build on.

The most valuable engineering skill I find is the ability to say "I've run into a problem, I am not the first person to run into this, let me research how other people solved similar problems so I can understand my problem and it's edges better".

I'm pretty sure you'll get more than enough 90s, 80s or even earlier papers by searching "audio recognition", classification, etc...

Also, having studied math in the university and knowing where to lookup things when needed is one thing but demonstrating the knowledge on the blackboard during the interviews is another, especially if you're a mid-career professional and don't have a time nor willingness to allocate month(s) for preparation.

Yes, I know Google Scholar didn't exist in 2002, but there were papers anyway:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=audio+fingerprint&hl=en...

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