Author is definitely a winner. He founded Bleacher Report. Disclaimer: I work there.
It's fine to disagree, but it's a pretty lame attack him based on a selected portion of his bio.
It's fine to disagree, but it's a pretty lame attack him based on a selected portion of his bio.
As opposed to attacking an entire blanket group of people based on their ability to answer personal questions in an interview?
tokenadult didn't start by calling people "losers".
It's lame when know-it-alls write blog posts about how their unscientific, unverified approach to some task ought to be adopted by everyone. It's even more lame when successful people ascribe their successes to such unscientific hoo-hah (even though we all have them), proceed to spoon feed them to everyone within eye-shot, and point at people and call them losers on arbitrary criteria.
The world is full of successful jerks - the jury is still out on whether your boss ever really had an effective hiring system.
Replace the word winner with successful, and does it seem so bad?
People are probably a lot more complicated than we think. We try to sort them out into categories as best we can, but we should remember that our understanding of another person's value is limited at best. Calling out people as "losers" because they don't fit your purpose is immature.
Success and Failure imply that the individual did task X, Y , Z to achieve a result S or not achieve result S. It has more to do with an individuals execution at the instance.
Loser almost implies that the person is doomed and some how naturally incapable.
This comment is like 10,000 spoons, when all you need is one spoon.
Can you explain what you mean?
A free ride, when you've already paid.
Some good advice that you just didn't take.
He seems to have this cute idea that you pay $120k to a institution of higher learning, then you dedicate all of your time to academics, then you emerge with a well-refined body of knowledge in your particular field. I thought this is how it worked too, before I attended a college.
Maybe his point is that you shouldn't be taken seriously if you pay $120k and spend 4 years doing something where you're not deeply intellectually invested, but it's hard to have the confidence at 17 to be the contrarian that doesn't attend college.
Look at his questions from another angle. Would you hire a CS grad who couldn't answer the question "What's your favorite programming language?"
I think his example might be overly specific, but the answers the candidate gave would certainly be a red flag.
This would be a nitpicking debate except that it gets to the heart of what makes the interview strategy in this article so dumb. There are lots of great programmers --- maybe some of the best --- who don't care all that much about language design or what language they'll be working in. There are, more importantly, a WHOLE MESS of programmers who can DEFINITELY talk your ears off about what the best language is... and then fail fizbuzz.
That's just asking for someone who thinks they're clever for figuring out how to drive screws with a hammer.
I'm always trying to choose between C++ and Lisp.
Disclaimer: I don't know Haskell or any other pure FP languages.
So this candidate partied his way through college and bluffed his way to a degree, what difference does that make if you're not hiring him to do anything related to his degree? I thought the prevailing notion here was that most of the stuff taught at college was largely pointless when compared to the hard-won knowledge gained in the trenches of the professional world.
Also saying that "Maybe he'll be a winner in the future, and I wish him well" makes me think he completely missed that, or perhaps has never heard of Bleacher Report. The intersection of tech people and sports people does not seem very large.