News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on What Is Space?. Parent comment

Re:What Is Space? by ChuckMcM on Monday July 03, 2017 @10:59PM (#14693206) 

   > You think a good way to tell whether I'd be good at 
   > writing code is my opinion on philosophy outside my
   > domain of expertise?
It is a way (I'm not sure how to quantify it) to understand if someone can develop something that nobody has ever imagined before. My criteria for evaluating the response was whether or not the candidate could engage with the question. It is something that happened often in my experience at Google, you were presented with an 'impossible' requirements and it was up to you to figure out what you could do about it. If someone was going to say "Well I don't know anything about that, ask someone else." Then the company knew they weren't going to be as successful as we would want them to be.

In the case of the physics student it was just their passion, they had gone way beyond the course work because they were interested in interesting questions.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What Is Space? by kobeya on Monday July 03, 2017 @11:27PM (#14693326)
> If someone was going to say "Well I don't know anything about that, ask someone else." Then the company knew they weren't going to be as successful as we would want them to be.

Except that is EXACTLY the correct response -- "I don't know, but I understand that physicists have a good idea of what space-time is, and I'll review the literature and see what the scientific consensus is and we can work from there."

The exact WRONG answer, in real life if not the interview, is "Hrm, I'm not sure but how about I make something up on the spot!"

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What Is Space? by ChuckMcM on Monday July 03, 2017 @11:34PM (#14693351)
I completely agree with you.

When I said (paraphrased) "I don't know, ask someone else" I meant literally that. People who are asked a question about something they don't know anything about can either, do as you suggest propose a way to research the question (win), or do as I've observed refuse to go any further (lose). People who make things up on the spot generally are weeded out before we got to that point.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What Is Space? by jdkuuuu on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @05:03AM (#14694562)
Not if the question is “how should we say this in Greek?“ and the guy in the next office knows Greek.
[ Parent | on HN ]