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Comment by ganjianwei | Hacker News Reader

This ad has succeeded to the extent that it's getting pretty popular on Hacker News and (hopefully) it's attracting the types of programmers they're out to hire.

Assuming that they've got their 'ideal hire' right, it's almost a win-win situation for them: if you hate the ad, you probably don't like their culture; if you love it, you'll apply and you might just fit right in with these "ninjas".

It alienates some but at least not the people they're trying to hire. I'm not saying such a culture's going to be great for them, just that posting such an ad will get them exactly who they want, and some mad publicity as well.

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If they want to hire 18-year-old hackers than it's probably okay, but I'm 30, love a fun work environment, and I'm pretty turned off by being so flip about CS. How can you praise a candidate for loving Haskell but be so arrogant to think CS has no value.

I imagine that it has no value to them. They're not out to create any new algorithms/systems/compilers/languages, simply to make proper use of the ones in existing libraries. To put it in the way they'd likely say it: "Ninja don't forge katana."

I don't understand, they don't care about cs principals, rather they want a 'ninja' who is able to write obscure code in languages people rarely use and is hard to understand.

WHY would anyone want this?

I realize that there are a lot of crappy degree programs out there, but this just plain wrong-headed. CS theory is applicable to anyone writing any kind of software more complex than simple one-off scripts. In fact I would argue that most of a proper CS program is more applicable to more practical problems than 90% of what you do in real world jobs. That's not to say you need CS to be a good programmer or anything silly like that, but the scope of things you learn in a CS degree is pretty much impossible to attain in the workplace without working on an amazing array of different projects.

It's not that CS has no value. It's that formal education in CS may not be what it's cracked up to be.

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