Re:My Interviews with Amazon
by derefr on Thursday July 28, 2016 @11:54PM
(#12184920)
1. Why are you assuming that my job description would/should be "engineer"? Why not, say, QA lead?
2. Why hand me the task? Why not hand someone else the task, and I'll wander in and make sure they get it done twice as quickly? Why does everyone need to be modellable as a task-queue that atomic problem-statements can be dropped into?
You don't expect, say, your office manager to program; but you do expect that, by hiring an office manager, more programming will get done, because now your programmers aren't running out to buy drinks for the fridge and toilet paper.
3. Remember that I did say that I could get work done by pair-programming with an intern, not an employee. The phrase "second resource" implies that you're imagining yourself handing me someone who you could get Hard Problems done on their own. My point was that, with a few people like me around, you could mostly just "hire" people (often for free!) who have no idea how to get Hard Problems—or even Regular Problems—done, and me and my type of person would guide them and the work would get done in the process.
This is usually known, in the trades, as an apprentice system. Apprentices do all the "work", you know. They're the hands that build most things that get built. Masters just stand there guiding those hands.
2. Why hand me the task? Why not hand someone else the task, and I'll wander in and make sure they get it done twice as quickly? Why does everyone need to be modellable as a task-queue that atomic problem-statements can be dropped into?
You don't expect, say, your office manager to program; but you do expect that, by hiring an office manager, more programming will get done, because now your programmers aren't running out to buy drinks for the fridge and toilet paper.
3. Remember that I did say that I could get work done by pair-programming with an intern, not an employee. The phrase "second resource" implies that you're imagining yourself handing me someone who you could get Hard Problems done on their own. My point was that, with a few people like me around, you could mostly just "hire" people (often for free!) who have no idea how to get Hard Problems—or even Regular Problems—done, and me and my type of person would guide them and the work would get done in the process.
This is usually known, in the trades, as an apprentice system. Apprentices do all the "work", you know. They're the hands that build most things that get built. Masters just stand there guiding those hands.