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Comment by willchang | Hacker News Reader

Once I was interviewing someone with a Ph.D in some vaguely IT-related field. She seemed kind of flaky but I assumed it was because she was a lot smarter than I was. I pressed on, and an hour later discovered that she didn't know what a typical size for a C pointer was. She was actually quite indignant when this occurred, saying in so many words that this was beneath her. Anyway I'm glad she was not hired, and didn't end up managing me. Our team worked on a project where data structures and storage were paramount concerns.

The moral of the story is, it takes a lot more than 5 minutes to figure out whether someone is hirable, and often a lot less than a month.

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> She seemed kind of flaky but I assumed it was because she was a lot smarter than I was. I pressed on, and an hour later I discovered that she didn't know what a typical size for a C pointer was.

That doesn't mean she's actually flaky or not smart. There's tons of info that smart programmers won't know off the top of their heads, either because they haven't worked in a given domain before, or haven't worked in it for a while.

She may well not have been qualified depending on what level of domain familiarity was expected from the get-go, but this implies nothing about her intelligence or capacity for domain competence.

Your making the claim that the above implies _nothing_ about her capacity for domain competence is a bit much. I thought it was a near-perfect diagnostic of her incompetence, and I'd be curious if anyone can sketch the profile of a very competent programmer, alive today, that doesn't have an inkling of the above fact. I don't think you can.

The problem is that you're conflating incompetence with a lack of capacity for competence. In other words, the mere fact of not knowing something implies that one can never know it. If that were true, nobody would know anything.

What I'm saying is, you may well be correct in your assessment that she was incompetent for the job, but that assessment doesn't qualify you to make the further implication that's she's not smart, or inherently incapable of competence.

I've noticed you added the bit about her being indignant and suggesting that such knowledge was beneath her. That does suggest she would be resistant to acquiring domain competence, which certainly doesn't bode well even if your company was open to letting the hiree acquire it on the job. On the other hand, I can understand her getting pissed off about someone using such a question as a litmus test.

People who program their entire lifes in high level languages may not need any of this stuff. For example

  * SQL
  * Lisp
  * Haskell
  * Python
  * (I ran out, but please feel free to continue)

> she didn't know what a typical size for a C pointer was.

I'll bite - what is the typical size?

Many of my friends in the embedded world think that pointers are two bytes. My friends in the workstation world used to think that pointers were 4 bytes but many are moving to 8 bytes.

I'd imagine that there are other sizes that are typical in some context. (Physical addresses are rarely 8 bytes but are often more than 4. C programmers who spend all their time in a physically addressed environment might well have an "odd" typical pointer size.)

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