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Comment by hfdgiutdryg | Hacker News Reader

Several years ago, right here on HN, a Google employee expressed shock that candidates wouldn't bother to open the "red book" and review before showing up for an interview at Google. I had no idea what the "red book" was. Turns out that it's a particular algorithms textbook used by several top universities. That poster was so wrapped up in a particular culture that he was using colloquial slang to refer to expectations.

That's about the same time I realized tech hiring is almost entirely about cultural bias. Watching coworkers talk about rejected candidates as if they were morons for simply having a slightly different approach to, say, OOP architecture, further convinced me of this.

In my experience, "culture fit", as cited in post-interview discussion, was almost purely code for ageism. Meanwhile, most of the supposedly technical stuff was really culture.

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As a self taught software developer, I struggle with the intellectual aspect of culture fit. On one hand, I have been told that all the stuff I have showcased on sdegutis.com is amazing. But on the other hand, I don't know many algorithms, can't comprehend math more advanced than high school algebra, and what I do know about software took me twice as long to learn it than it normally takes others.

I have found that freelancing avoids even coming to the question of culture fit. Clients don't care what you know or what kind of books you read or where you went to school, they care what you can do. I have been turned down for jobs for not figuring out their algorithms, whereas the one client I have (I'm open to new clients btw) has told me that he's glad that he found me, because I get the job done fast and well and for cheap.

The downside of this is that you're expected to do a perfect job 100% of the time and have to bite every minute that you lose to yak shaving or other problems, whereas if you work for an employer, they are more understanding if it takes a day to solve some stupid Java XML configuration issue.

No offence, but googling your name yields some very questionable search results about events in Woodstock, IL. If it's true, then perhaps the true cause of cultural discrepancy comes from assumptions based on a Google search?

Perhaps I am the odd one out, but whenever a potential new hire is presented to the team, I do a quick Google search and investigation about whom that person might be and whether I'd like working with that person, regardless of his/her skills and knowledge. Every day interactions make up for a very large portion of work agenda.

Doing the same search, it appears that there are at least three people named Steven Degutis with different middle names: https://www.instantcheckmate.com/people/steven-degutis/

Searching for someone's name can at best give you suspicions, but name collisions are so common that you can't know whether the person you found mentioned online is the same you wanted to find out about.

Personally, I have almost no real-name presence on the internet, so the top result for my name is some other guy's Instagram account. You might spend a lot of time looking at his posts, but that won't help you learn anything about me.

Some suspicions can be clarified. Especially ones with clear photos available.

As per online presence - we do not hire people that we have never seen. We're a remote and distributed team, thus rarely any hires get to have a walk-in interview, but we do always see the person being interviewed. I wouldn't waste hours looking at posts of a person I can clearly see is not my potential colleague. Having no online presence is fine, most of us don't at my current job. However, if it's there, it is going to be examined. It's way harder to get to know to understand someone as a person if you've never had had a face-to-face interaction, therefore having a video call is a must.

Yes, that is the reason 99% of the jobs offered to me have been rescinded. I was originally talking about the other 1%, where I failed the whiteboard or algorithms tests.

You're right. Ultimately, people are uncomfortable with the idea of being around me based on what I did. Even if you take the huge exaggerations out of those articles, what I did was still enough that people just don't want to be around me.

There's no path for redemption for me. It doesn't matter how much I ever change, or how remorseful or sincerely sorry I was, or how hard I work to stay positive and struggle daily against letting the bitterness and pessimism in. But these are things I do for myself.

I really thought that this would show through in my character, and that people would see the good that I strive to always have in me and try to always be, and that this would override in their minds what I've done in the past. But apparently that's not how life works.

I am in the process of interviewing a guy for a technical role that has the same name as the frontman for a very famous rock band. I am 99% certain I was not in contact with him... although googling this guy's name would come up with articles about "his" drug addictions...

Google is a wonderful tool but I would prefer to not search for the person online, as I am more concerned that false positives might unfairly bias my opinions on the applicant.

The top search for my name is a kid in England who is serving life in prison for murdering his girlfriend when he was 16 and she was 14. Obviously not me, but I always wonder how many potential employers have a visceral aversion to hiring me after a quick google search.

> The downside of this is that you're expected to do a perfect job 100% of the time and have to bite every minute that you lose to yak shaving or other problems, whereas if you work for an employer, they are more understanding if it takes a day to solve some stupid Java XML configuration issue.

The usual solution to this is to charge more. :)

I thought the usual solution is to make it very clear to the client that yak shaving is billable time. I even have a section in my invoice that goes into detail about how much they're paying me for that yak shaving time. The yak shaving stops pretty damned fast after they get that first invoice.

yak shaving is time the dev spends futzing around with tooling configuration, it has nothing to do with the client.

Sometimes yak shaving is necessary for a project (Java build config funtimes), in other cases not so much (fiddling with autocompletion plugins in your .vimrc)

Oh, right. I always get yak shaving confused with bike shedding.

I bill the client if what I’m doing for them is either (a) keeping from working on another clients project (example: driving from my office to their site) or (b) if they wouldn’t expect to dock their own employees for doing the same thing (example: updating software).

Even without knowing what you are charging I can tell you aren’t charging enough. :-)

> (I'm open to new clients btw)

I am not meaning to be offensive, but I really wish I could master the art of sales. I have some trouble adding in a sales pitch in an informative or casual setting. So you have any resources you would recommend for learning how to sell yourself?

[Sorry if this does not make much sense I am still learning English]

I looked it your profile, your profile pic matches the question searchable results on the 3rd link regarding a police report

There's nothing on yolur blog disputing any of the claims either. That's usually not a good sign either... its basically admitting that the story is the truth

Also while I like the blog its just information overload. There's no use of white space, no space to "rest". It feels like your throwing everything at me when I didn't ask for all of it. I just want to know a little bit about you as a person, not all your thought processes. It needs a gentler introduction imo, its too brutalist.

Also forces your brain to read left to right, most people naturally read straight downward / scroll down. The portfolio section is very well done though.

There's benefits in not throwing a single page portfolio as well. I spread mine across several pages. You can choose to find out what you want to know about me. I use a barebones simple template so I can throw my own uniqueness into it

The blog posts... they give me headaches reading it. The content is far too short and frequent, so I'm constantly seeing the footer move around too often. It gets really fatiguing. I get the general impression that the potential employer will feel you have too many random ideas tossed on the table.

The rule of thumb is have a 5min read or 750-1500 word count. There are some rules to that exception though, just be aware people have short attention spans, myself included.

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A blog represents you as a person. It gives the impression that you know how to build stuff efficiently, and can pickup any programming language quickly. However, your blog essentially states that you only love coding and not much else really. It also gives the impression that you like asserting yourself onto people, because there's no white space, the UX is too brutalist. The questionable 3rd google link fits the same persona (with photo verification), you don't dispute it either. This gives the impression while you might be great as a solo-developer, working in teams might have cultural fit issues.

It might not even be you, you might work really well in a team. Or an interesting person that people enjoy having around. However it might just be employees at the company who might outright not want to work with you based on social media stigmas.

I have been both on the hiring and interviewing side many times before. My impression is not unique, its probably what most recruiters assume as well. Some companies would rather have someone more rounded with interests across other spectrums. Your best interest would be hiring a firm specializing in SEO and pushing negative results downward. Something like this, I just googled around for you. https://www.abine.com/blog/2017/push-negative-search-results...

I have a generic firstName and lastName, in fact there's many more famous people with my name. I never have to worry about silly google searches, I get to control my branding however I like which is convenient. Your name on the other hand ... is very unique. This is both good and bad, if you become famous its easy for people to recognize your name. But for you its a bad thing.

Yes, those articles are the reason 99% of the jobs offered to me were rescinded. But I was speaking at first of the ones where I failed the whiteboard or algorithm test.

Despite the fact that the articles are highly exaggerated and contain much inaccurate information, what I actually did wrong was still enough to put it in people's minds that they will never be comfortable around me. There is no actual path for redemption for me in society. I have come to accept this.

It would be great if I could get those articles pushed off the google search for me, but it's never going to happen. Since I can't get work, we are consistently below negative in our bank account. Last month we passed -$700. We still have bills from July that haven't been paid yet, including electric and natural gas.

All your suggestions for improving my portfolio site are great, but at this point there's no reason to put any more time into that site. I built it to get me a job, and it's clear I won't get a job ever again. The only client I have, I have because he's a good person who looks at me as a human being and sees the good in me, and is excited to get my talent at this good of a deal.

I could lie. I could change my name and not tell companies about my past. Then I would be able to make 100-150k. I could make it if I choose to be unethical. But I won't. Because despite what everyone thinks of me, and despite whatever happens to me, I am trying to be a good person and do right. I was hoping that would show through in my character throughout all my blog posts and posts on HN and everywhere. I guess it did to some extend, because I do have that one client.

The algorithms test or whiteboards I struggle as well. Math is not my strong suit either.

I have never been on that side of the fence where I have been incarcerated or put on an offender list. This could happen to anyone, you could just be taking a piss in the woods after a long night of drinking and be placed on that list. You could just be working out in an open gym park, have your fly down, forget it was there and cause public indecency to minors. Everyone will just assume the same - that you are a pedophile regardless if it was true, or even intentional, or just a one off mistake

I can't relate to your bank account issues personally, I have been lucky in that I have not had to worry about finances in the negative. Dealing with paycheck by paycheck is very draining mentally, I do nonprofit work with people who are disadvantaged, low income, or are homeless. I imagine you don't have a lot of free time in your day either.

Portfolio is actually fine for what it is, I might have overexaggerated about fixes that needed to be made.

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I really think the "lie" part is a little opinionated though. I do not think there is such a thing as ethical marketing at all. I don't draw the lines between black and white either, its just a gray zone for me. I lived a lot of my life telling lies not because I wanted to, because I didn't have a choice in the matter. I still try to do good and live by a set of rules though, but I realize things don't work out that way. Sometimes life just sucks and you are just unlucky and were in the wrong place and wrong time.

You have all the skills a potential employer wants. My friend told me this same advice to me as well - You are limiting yourself. You are holding yourself back. I have had similar yet different problems, I am socially shy on social media, but I only recently started blogging and rebranding myself under one social media name (vincentntang). I have had a very complicated past, I have never been understood most of my life, I do see where you are coming from to some extent. I dumped it here if you are curious http://vincentmtang.com/2018/08/13/story-of-my-life/.

Throwing all your eggs in one basket, one client, is just a disaster waiting to happen, especially with your financial situation. He might be a good person at heart or just taking an economic advantage over your situation. You said it yourself, because I get the job done fast and well and for cheap.

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Changing your name and using social media branding is unethical, but I would argue what HR is doing to potential employees is even more unethical. I think its not fair either for someone to assume who you are based on one past incident either. I got sick of dealing with people assuming things about me so that's why I mostly blog, its to tell the stories from my perspective. I don't talk about webtechnologies half the time, many times its just snippets of stories from my life. Debatedly I want to start doing things on youtube again as well, so I can share more tidbits of things that interest me

Most of your articles are opinion pieces, but where are all the adventures and stories of how you learned XYZ or struggled with dealing with incarceration? People would love to hear your stories, and your struggles, it makes you more relateable. I wouldn't use HN as a means to this end though, I mostly use HN to hash out potential stories I want to write about.

You aren't the only person with incarceration problems though. There's a whole network of developers who have been incarcerated, here on this job search tool. https://www.70millionjobs.com/

> "where are all the adventures and stories of how you learned XYZ or struggled with dealing with incarceration?"

It would be a downer. People want to be uplifted and read stories about people's successes. My life isn't there yet.

> "what HR is doing to potential employees is even more unethical"

This comes back to culture fit. If my presence would make anyone uncomfortable, simply because of my past, then it's not a good fit for either them or me. Plain and simple.

> "Throwing all your eggs in one basket, one client, is just a disaster waiting to happen, especially with your financial situation"

Which is why I'm mentioning my availability and services in hopes of getting more work for when his runs out.

True you make good points.

I still think you should write something about your incarceration though on your blog. Your whole blog just seems to entirely ignore it. I think it would be best to directly address the concerns potential employers and prospects might have on things they find in a google search. You would probably get more prospects sympathsizing to your situation. It might seem like a downer, but the downer stories shows you've learned from your past mistake as well. That you can accept criticism thrown your way and openly accept events that transpired in your life good or bad. This can only be seen as a positive trait about you.

Dont let people draw assumptions about you, let your stories speak for themselves.

I wish you the best on your journey. You dont have it easy but im sure you will figure something out

Well I know fairly small company where people pretty much expected every candidate to be deeply familiar with The Art of Computer Programming Book by Donald Knuth. The even funnier part it was 100% PHP shop.

I bought the first volume of TAoCP when it came out. The number of people that I know that are "deeply familiar with The Art of Computer Programming" approaches zero. I have read some sections in great detail, but won't claim deep familiarity. I don't know of anyone who has read the whole thing. I am a bit skeptical of this claim.

That is exactly why this is funny :). You have to dif. expected and actually were able to find. From my understanding only the CTO would more or less actually fit the description.

I'm not sure why people still have problems with modern PHP. Why is that funny?

It's the shitty PHP projects they don't tell you about in the interview that people have a problem with that they then shovel on your plate.

But that really goes for any language.

The true extent of technical debt is almost never realized in an interview, but you can't really do much about it if you accept the job and they tell you to work on it.

> But that really goes for any language.

It goes so much more for php than any other language. PHP used to be so popular and even now with JS and other languages on top, there's still so many legacy php apps out there for maintenance. I deal with them regularly and most of them are really bad.

And no, I'm not shitting on the language. It's a decent language nowadays.

You know many people who are enough into CS to go through "The Art of Computer Programming" multiple times but yet use PHP a lot? Modern PHP is OK but I doubt it's a good default choice at present given all the alternatives.

If a company already has a large PHP codebase, then it's probably the right choice to stick with it. And it can scale just fine, easily as well as Python or Ruby if you dig into how to do it right.

But to manage scalable PHP (or any language, for that matter) you still need smart programmers, a lot of whom will have been through most of the serious academic works in the field. They won't love working with PHP (I never did), and it might mean greater flight risk (yup!), but they might join the job anyways (at least half a dozen people that I know with those creds that joined up with the last project I was on where we had no choice but to deal with PHP) because of other reasons, like liking the company, people, or goals.

I've worked with a dozen different languages over the last 20 years. PHP is not one that I'd pick for a new project, but TBH, it's not the worst I've had to deal with. My experiences with the Visual Basic, Perl, and R code that I've had to interact with were actually far worse (typically because the people that code them are not as solid in software engineering), but I wouldn't judge people that use them just based on having done so. Unless we're spinning up new prototypes, very few of us actually get to choose the technologies that we use.

I've learned to avoid vb.net shops not because of the language per se, but because of the culture that allows for sticking with something that has widely considered legacy for some time now.

I know this is painting with a broad brush, and I'm working from a sample size of 2 (or, 2 vb.net shops that I've worked with), and the software engineering culture as a whole was really bad on those teams.

>>> And it can scale just fine, easily as well as Python or Ruby if you dig into how to do it right.

The webserver is scaled by just adding more instances in parallel with a load balancer. It's the database that needs to scale and that's the challenge.

Absolutely, though I'd warn that if you naively use PHP and a default setup (Apache with default settings for PHP or something like that), you're probably not going to serve as much traffic per server as a naive Python or Ruby setup will get you. You have to tune your way there, and it can be a bit of a process, but it's definitely possible, and there's nothing very subtle about it.

One of the biggest problems with PHP, IMO, is that most of the code you'll find online is extremely old, and probably will give you terrible advice, using old deprecated mysql libraries, etc.

And don't you have to reopen database connections for each php request? Even that seems fairly difficult to scale, unless there's a way around it that I'm not aware of (I don't use php very often, definitely not at scale).

Of course not. Connection pooling is the most basic feature of any database library. It would be really shocking if PHP didn't do that.

Is there an easier way to make a CRUD-type app?

I started learning PHP/Laravel the other day and was able to make an item/data management system with a corresponding JSON API in about an hour.

It's bootstrap so the UI isn't unique or innovative, but it's definitely passable and it works really well.

Obviously Javascript, Ruby, Golang, Python.

Javascript has become a nice language. You can't avoid it in webdev. Rich ecosystem. Languages like Typescript, Elm, Purescript, etc. are close.

Ruby is very practical, has everything, very consistent and clean. PHP is not consistent and not clean.

Golang is fast and the simplest language that is actually used in the industry. It is dramatically simpler than C. It is the fastest.

Python is like Ruby, but even more practical because it has ML and math, whereas Ruby does not.

PHP has no place in this world.

PHP is very much like Java, only being dynamically interpreted. Symfony is a very high quality framework, with which can build serious applications.

Python is surely nice looking, but as it allows redefinition of everything at runtime, it is impossible to optimize at compile time. I think PHP, with the recent type strictness functionality, is better positioned for making way to new developments like meaningfull code analysis, (compile time) optimizations and performant JIT compilers. Python is too dynamic for that, unfortunately. The same holds for JavaScript.

I don't know Ruby well, but I know it is also slow.

The biggest problem with PHP is that it standards library has inconsistent naming. The syntax is very much Java-like. If PHP would shove the standard library into `LegacyPrelude` (and have it automatically loaded like Haskell) it could improve on that as well. This problem is not as fundamental as the other problems in my opinion, although still requiring a major effort to slowly turn to a new `Prelude`.

The biggest problem with PHP is that a lot of smart people don't want to work with it for whatever reason, and you really want these smart people. To succeed you have to have a good team. Difficult to assemble one with PHP as your language.

If you use PHP you are going to lose. The world has moved on. Remember that you are not the only game in town. Good engineers have opportunities in Python, Javascript, Ruby, Rust, Golang, whatever. These languages have better reputation, better communities, they are more exciting. PHP might have become better but it's too late. It wasn't late for Javascript, but it is late for PHP.

I have to say, I found his comment that it was a PHP shop funny, but your response asking 'why is that funny' is even more funny

Please don't turn this into some language flame war. This isn't the place for that type of mentality.

I find that impossible to believe :)

even more funny it was internal payment processor @ large porn conglomerate in Eastern Europe.

Why is it funny? That seems like exactly the high load, high availability requirements that would require software quality way higher than in a typical SV app that never gets above 1k DAU.

The payment processing side is not really high load

I feel like there's a pun in here somewhere... ಠ_ಠ

They did write a functional framework and used "only" immutable vars though.

Which is ironic, given the largely imperative approach taken by TAoCP.

I googled "red book" and found one by Jung, and one by Mao. I tried adding "computer science" and got one on relational databases, and one on OpenGL.

If knowing "the red book" were so important to Google, you'd think they would make sure their own search engine knew how to find it.

I have no idea which book they're referring to. For red computer science books, the only ones that come to mind are Numerical Recipes (probably not a Google favorite), one version of Appel's compiler book (not really an algorithms book), and perhaps the old edition of AIMA (though on further inspection, it's more brown).

I think the red book is the Robert Sedgewick book, but there are any number of well-known textbooks for intro to algorithms.

Huh - I would've guessed Algorithm Design Manual by Skienna. I have no idea which book the red book is supposed to be either, but I did read the Steve Yegge blog post about getting a job at Google in which he recommended reading it. Since that Yegge article is also used by Google recruiters as a resource for interview prep (according to Yegge), seemed natural to assume Skienna.

The Robert Sedgewick book. It is an excellent book. All the cool kids have a red one. Mine was blueish purple and in pascal. LOL, I'll never get a job at Google.

"red book algorithms" will get you there

While I agree with your sentiment about cultural bias, I don't necessarily feel that the red book thing is all that relevant. I live in Europe and I've heard of (and consequently read) the 'red book', though I wouldn't have necessarily called it that.

Indeed. The OpenGL Programming Guide[1] has been the "Red Book" since it was published in 1997. Everybody knows about the Red Book.

More seriously, I have no idea what book you're talking about. Whatever it is you're referring to, it was not the textbook used when I took Data Structures and Algorithms in undergrad (EE), nor when I TA'd the course while doing my master's (CS, Graphics) at another university.

It feels a little arbitrary. As an EE, I took many classes on the fundamental design and construction of computers and communication networks. That knowledge has been very useful in understanding how my software interacts with the world. I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of trees, graphs and other data structures are weaker than those who spent many courses on them. But the company needs a broad assortment of skills to succeed, so it seems like a bad idea to base hiring heavily on finding people that all have the same talents as the interviewer. Of course, if I need to conform to that mold to pass the interview, that's what I'll do.

[1]: http://www.opengl-redbook.com/

It's hard to glean from the information given whether the Googler was so intent in the red book (Skiena, Algorithm Design Manual) that he required interviewees to be able to quote verbatim or just expected a certain knowledge of algorithms (for which a number of books would suffice, but Skiena really is a great resource for).

Please be more sensitive about declaring something you know 'everyone knows.' Especially when in the same breath you admit to not knowing what red book parent and grandparent are talking about. While I don't match the example, folks born in 1997 when the book came out are just about graduating college in a couple of years, and expecting everyone to know all the nooks and crannies of computer science is not at all feasible. Relevant XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

It's possible GP was trying to make a joke. One signifier of this is that he follows with "more seriously", suggesting what came before was less serious. You should be more sensitive before suggesting that someone isn't making a joke.

That's exactly the point I was trying to make. I agree entirely.

Current management training is that “Culture fit” is a minefield of unconscious bias. It will take time to roll out but you’ll hear this phrase less and less over time. Possibly not much better, a more vogue term is “culture add.”

I hear "culture fit" a lot from recruiters. They are just talking about it generally...but it is so vauge I have no idea what to say.

When I hear "Red book," I think of the OpenGL programming guide.

I would read that as the "red book in algorithms" this is probably because of the famous OpenGL red book, so now we refer to the "fundamental" book in an area as the red book.

In a sense yes its "wrapped up in a particular culture" I guess the culture that exposed me to this "red book" was a CS bachelors that included graphical programming as a course.

Edit: If someone from google said to read the red book as a helper for interviewing I would probably return with "wait you mean the OpenGL book?"

I'm curious what that "red book" is now. Wouldn't it be "Algorithm Design Manual" by Skiena?

In the context of a Google interview, I imagine it's whatever Stanford kids use.

Just to confirm, the “red book” is the one by sedgewick and Wayne?

Yes, in the context of algorithms - https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/

However, at this point, I end up looking up that particular website instead of trying to remember anything about this book at all.

It’s one of these Borges moves: The book doesn’t really exist, outside of the remarks of elusive Google interviewers who, so legend has it, expect you to master it.

Hmm, I'd assumed Skiena https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781848000698

Since great-grandparent isn't responding, if anyone in the know could help out the rest of us on the outside, that would be awesome.

Readings in Database Systems by Joseph Hellerstein and Michael Stonebraker

https://www.amazon.com/Readings-Database-Systems-Joseph-Hell...

Problem is both are popular algorithms books and both are red...

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