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Comment by dpflan | Hacker News Reader

Have you read Coders at Work [1]? There are 15 computer scientists interviewed (listed below). Perhaps it's time for another edition with Dean, Carmack, and others.

Coders at Work Interviewee List:

- Jamie Zawinski

- Brad Fitzpatrick

- Douglas Crockford

- Brendan Eich

- Joshua Bloch

- Joe Armstrong

- Simon Peyton Jones

- Peter Norvig

- Guy Steele

- Dan Ingalls

- L Peter Deutsch

- Ken Thompson

- Fran Allen

- Bernie Cosell

- Donald Knuth

[1] http://codersatwork.com/

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4 of these guys are Google employees right now:

- Brad Fitzpatrick - Joshua Bloch - Peter Norvig - Ken Thompson

Josh Bloch left Google several years ago.

I had seen the trend, via tech news, from some years ago, of Google hiring many top CS people. They might even have the largest number of such people of any company in the world, maybe except for a few other possible toppers like IBM or Microsoft? Just guessing here, based on some anecdata.

And while I'm guessing, let me add a bit of imagining :) I used to, and still wish, that Google or a company like it would come out with a RAD GUI app creation tool like Delphi (of course better is fine too) and make it cheap or free to use to develop GUI apps with (and then keep supporting and developing it, and not make a mess of it like Borland/Inprise/CodeGear did - at least their management did or seems to have done, based on news read over the years). They definitely have the brainpower / bandwidth for doing such a product. But instead they are web-and-mobile-only (or mostly, AFAIK), unfortunately.

>like Borland/Inprise/CodeGear did

By somewhat frequent changes of direction, I mean, at least some of them, particularly during the Inprise years. Like changing focus from dev tools vendor to ALM vendor.

Brad is amazing. He has contributed so much back to the OSS and written excellent code. A true hero, also the youngest of the lot in the book.

I've pretty immense respect for Brad. He's very patient and empathetic in how he interacts with people on email lists, etc.

I would consider myself a success if I have even half of this empathy and patience. :)

Just a humorous thought: imagine getting all of their resumes for a software engineer position. How do you even interview these people or even choose one for that matter?

You stand, salute and offer your chair, obviously

"Welcome, Dr. Knuth! Let's see if you can invert a binary tree..."

Judging by how ridiculous hiring (still) is in the software development world these days I suspect a lot of companies would give them the full fizz-buzz treatment if they made it through the first 3 phone screens.

The author of the "Coders at Work" was asked why he did not have interview at Carmack in one of the talks and his reply was he had contacted him but Carmack did not reply back and he said that with a very bad attitude as though Carmack owes him.

interesting to note that Jamie Zawinski, Peter Norvig, Guy Steele and L Peter Deutsch are all lispers

So is Peter Seibel, the interviewer…

And Zawinski [1] achieved what he did with only a high school "degree" (in terms of formal education), according to what Norvig said here:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

If you like CAW another good one is Masterminds of Programming.

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