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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> In 2001, Norvig published a short article titled Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years,[20] arguing against the fashionable introductory programming textbooks that purported to teach programming in days or weeks. The article was widely shared and discussed, and has attracted contributed translations to over 20 languages.[20]

Anyone who followed this article would've greatly threatened their chances of being hired by Google, since they would've spent their time on things other than rehearsing for the interviews.

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No, the book is not about rehearsing you for interviews. In contrary, the book emphasizes on the mastery of your tech which books rehearsing you for interviews neither claim nor can do.

The whole idea of the book is to get deep insight into your tech following the 10 000 hours rule which one might achieve within 10 years of practice.

It was published against the mainstream idea of that time advertised under the name "Teach Yourself Something In 24 Hours". This book is a call for hard work, mastery and is against rushing when learning.

Op means that if they followed Norvig’s advice they wouldn’t be hired by Google, because they’d be studying actual programming instead of rehearsing Leetcode for interviews.

You are right. Thank you.

On the other hand, mastery through 10 years of practice means and leads to a good knowledge of data structures and algorithms.

I don't think it necessarily leads to a of mastery of data structures and algorithms in the context of leetcode/modern coding interviews. One can do a lot of coding, and even be paid for it, for years and just not even encounter a lot of this material. Though one will have developed much of the same intuition that you typically acquire in a data structures class, it doesn't necessarily mean you're prepared to code mergesort on a whiteboard.

As someone who's been hired by Google twice, I'm very happy that I spent 99% of my time actually programming. (I did a day or two of Leetcode before the second time, just to make sure I was appropriately calibrated. It didn't exist before the first time.)

I don’t know what interviewing at Google is like now but I interviewed for Google in 2008 (no offer) and 2012 (offer) and the questions on both occasions were not of the nature that leetcode could have helped with much.

You're right about the "Teach yourself X in Y days" books.

I should've given some additional context in my comment:

The author of this article was heading Google engineering (back when Google was cool), but when the Google engineering interviews seemed to have little or nothing to do with the advice in this article.

Getting hired by Google isn't the end-goal of learning programming.

It seems the irony has been mostly lost. Gave me a chuckle. :)

Same joke, published in 1999: "learn greek in 25 years". Wonder if this inspired Norvig.

https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Greek-Years-Brian-Church/dp/960...

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