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Comment by yudlejoza | Hacker News Reader

Oh no, no, no.

They won't be able to invert a binary tree on white-board, or a hacker-rank tab, in 30-45 minutes.

They're clearly not the smartest ones.

In my industry (computational engineering) I fear leetcode etc. is becoming the bar one must pass before being questioned about anything germane (e.g. what kind of time integrator to use in this situation, different ways to handle that boundary condition, derive a numerical system for some physics with some spatial accuracy, etc) This takes time away from me actually being the best numericist I can be, and puts me off doing leet-code challenges. It’s absolutely infuriating. When I arrived on the scene ~8 years ago we were isolated from that crap. No more. (It’s crap because there are better ways to test if we are competent (ie give me a multiresolution analysis problem on the proverbial white board, not a string puzzle, otherwise you throw the employee baby out with the bath water or make the baby memorize pointless (for this kind of baby) trivia.

I wonder if this is somehow a scheme to reduce employee turnover in general - to get salaries under control. I doubt it could so be planned. I have no doubt it has some effect in that direction as it adds friction and to the job hunters process.

Oh i see what you did there and where you come from.

Its actually how inbelieve Elon got successful .. its his physics training.

Ive met physics students in higher semesters ... and they were down right better programmers too (thry built things they used, they really hacked programs together) while we spent our time trying to ... well i dont know what, but somethig wasnt right. This wasnt CS50 though .. just a German uni.

Doesn't Elon just have a degree and a few weeks of a PhD? I wouldn't attribute all his success to one thing.

The undergraduate portion of physics is the most general and therefore the most helpful for what Elon does (really broad scope systems engineering with an ability to go fractal deep into any technical detail). And I actually do think the physics degree was majorly helpful in the approach Elon takes to solving problems in new fields. Elon is smart, sure, but not the smartest person ever. You have to credit the physics approach for much of that (and a combination of tough life growing up and extended family that provided a safety net that enabled risk-taking... the latter part could be scaled but the former shouldn’t—and may have contributed to some of Elon’s flaws). The good thing is that undergraduate physics education can be scaled to a lot of people (and aspects of its approach to solving problems adopted by other fields).

I have a physics degree. I think an interesting thing about physics education is that it teaches resourcefulness and opportunism. Physics "owns" relatively few techniques and technologies. It borrows from others, and combines things.

One of the reasons physicists like programming so much, is that it's the modern duct tape for putting disparate things together, and there's so much stuff out there to use.

Physicists are always among the earliest users of technologies -- vacuum tubes, transistors, and successive generations of computers. At my college, the earliest adopters of personal computers were all physics professors. The one exception was a humanities prof whose kid happened to be a physics major.

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