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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

i wonder how many cto's would be totally unable to hack it.

I don't know how many can't but Microsoft Azure's CTO is Mark Russinovich who was responsible for creating the sysinternal tools. He can most definitely hack.

agreed.

i dont know mark or his story well, byt a quick review of systinternals & mark does make me question this situation in another way though. mark had enormous opportunity, just vast. 1994 phd. a year at numega, building winternals for a year. cofounding & chief archtiecting a sysinternals startup.

he can clearly hack. i think he still can. he seems to still be the chief blogger/vlogger on sysinternals, an uber-technical tool, serving as a chief information radiator for it; strong technics mixed with great demonstrated communication abilities: a great combo.

but still i can varry some doubt. would he have been a good MAANA employee, or other medium-sized tech company? ever? would he have been able to engage in that kind of product development, amid these product development lifecycles? staying good & sharp & beliving in oneself & what one is up to is a question of opportunity, alongside talent & capability. maybe he would have made a shit sde ii. which he probably does hire many smart sharp well trained candidates for.

At some point he could, but maybe not anymore.

With some time to get the rust off, yeah though

He still maintains the sysinternal tools.

but can he reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard?

But can he solve an obscure dynamic programming problem from the interviewer's PhD thesis in 20 minutes on the whiteboard, with a marker that's almost spent? That's a completely different skill than actual software engineering, that the companies (including Microsoft) continue to inexplicably screen for.

I recently interviewed with AWS. I still remember one of the questions. It boiled down to: please implement Aho-Corasick in 10 minutes on a virtual whiteboard.

Perhaps there are folks in programming competitions that can do that, but not moi.

It blows my mind how tricky some of the technical interviews I have been through, and even passed, and even been offered roles for, but this morning I spent thirty minutes failing to update the s3 tags on a bucket literally named 'example-bucket'.

I kind of wonder if there actually was a systematic study of some sort aimed at quantifying how much time people are wasting on unnecessarily manual wrangling of cloud infrastructure. I know I waste a lot of time on that, even though I try to automate everything I reasonably can, and I don't use three dozen different services. Unbelievably obtuse docs even for the simplest things, dozens of manual yak shaving steps which could be done by a shell script, nobody seems to give a slightest shit - people think that's how it ought to be.

Thanks for the nerd sniping I'm going to be running down for the next few hours.

I bought my own markers recently, just so I would never have to deal with "this marker is almost out, and this one is too light to be able to read, and this one...." bullshit.

Surely you understand these roles both use wildly different skillsets?

none the less i think a leader who could & who can understand the current sde II role & hack it if they had to is almost always a better more capable general.

that ability to empathize & share perspective helps, if not necessarily the ability to sling stuff together & get it shipped, day by day.

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