“Do you need to know who invented the wheel to work in the automobile industry? Or who invented bottle openers to work in a restaurant?”
Of course not. But if you work in the automobile industry, you should know big names like Ford, Honda, etc. Or if you work in the restaurant industry, you should probably know the names when it comes to large distributors, vendors, etc.
It’s not a question of how you should take a language you use and know the entire history of it. But you’d hopefully be immersed enough in the language/technology/whatever that you’re at least familiar with the names of people who contribute a lot to it.
It always is entertaining to see the knee-jerk reaction folks have to the stuff posted on here.
Wow, a lot of people on this blog who will not be hired by Jeff. Makes his job easier I guess.
I think the real issue Jeff was trying to get at was whether you have any intellectual curiosity about the field, not a test of plain knowledge. If you don’t know any of those names, but were curious and looked them up on Wikipedia, then I’d say you have intellectual curiosity and an interest in learning. I have a feeling (from past blog posts) that Jeff would see that as a good sign.
"If the next programmer you interview can’t identify at least one of the programmers interviewed in Coders at Work and tell you roughly what they’re famous for …
… I’d say that’s an immediate no-hire. "
I don’t know any of thoses programmer. They don’t show you those in school. I still am a good programmer. I don’t see why you wouldn’t hire someone if they don’t know about some programmers, even if they have done some great things in their life!
It doesn’t mean they are not good programmers.
It just means that this person haven’t heard of that person. And maybe I know about other programmers that you don’t know about. I’m from Quebec, so what if I learned about other programmers that did important things but over here in Quebec.
The only one I know in that list is Knuth, but I wouldn’t be able to say what he’s famous for, only that he’s really famous.
I wouldn’t consider myself a bad programmer either, I stay up-to-date with the technology and I’m pretty sure my bosses are quite happy with my work and knowledge of programming.
To be fair, I’m not sure programming is my true calling (I enjoy designing applications much more) and I have zero-interest in the low-level stuff, I hate working on mathematics algorithms.
I really can’t think of a situation when the knowledge of Brian Kernighan or Donald Knuth would help me in any way in a project. It’s nice to know the history of the craft, but what matters is the skill in it - that’s universally applicable, no matter what*.
*Note: History as in “this approach to problem A has been tried and it failed” does count into skill and knowledge rather than history.
I know a buttload of programmers who can quote all sorts of lines from books or conferences. Knowing who did what really doesn’t make a person a better programmer. I don’t understand what knowing a name has anything to do with how you code.
I’m sure you didn’t mean that in strictly words. Of course a good understanding of what’s going on today is reviewing a bit of history.
A lot of people don’t know Linux was created based on Minix inspired the creation of Linux (see Wikipedia). I studied Minix before I went into the Operating System classes and it made me more comfortable with all system calls within its kernel, it made sense to me.
@Noah Yetter - “Programming is about getting shit done” - last time I heard this from an architect I worked with he really released shit, monstrously shit system. But I understood this message too.
If I recall Jeff had to be corrected about pronouncing Dijkstra’s and Knuth’s names correctly, yet he’s telling us we need to know one of these or we should never be hired?
Personally, I’d take someone who knows what NP Complete means over someone who pretends to know or who just knows a few names from reading a book about “coders”…
If you went to college for CS you should know who Knuth and Dijkstra are. But that is not something I ask during interviews. Trivia is not a valuable “skill” in our profession.
http://www.maplestory4mesos.com is a Specialized MapleStory Mesos store,we sell Maple Story Mesos,you can buy Safe Maple Story Mesos,Cheap Maple Story Mesos from us."
I like this blog, but sometimes it goes off a few bytes.
If you, for instance, take into consideration people from other parts of the world (me), other continents and other countries. On one hand, some of them would have known of one or two people from the list, but most of them wouldn’t know a single name on that list.
I would’ve passed the test, but thats only because I read allot and frequently review and rewrite code from some of those great programmers whose names have passed my memory buffer registers over the years.
People that I know and whom I have worked with would have certainly failed this test, because they refrain from code, computer or any other kind of history. They thrive on their programming skills and their mathematical and logical sense of seeing things. Who’s to say that they also don’t belong on that list.
I would present you with my own list of people, carefully selected, chosen if you will, who’s code I glanced upon and who’s programs I ran night after night, but who would care?
Chill out folks. I worked with someone that would ask you to tell a joke in the middle of the interview to see how you did under pressure and to guage how well you got back on track after. Stop taking everything so literally people, it’s not like he said he’s not hire someone in the past because they couldn’t indentfy Brandon Eich.
