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A comment on No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This. Parent comment

Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This by treis on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @10:18AM (#25046868)
>The guy knows fuel maps, timing and compression ratios like the back of his hand, but I keep insisting that he tell me how the sun gear of the transmission engages the planetaries and in what sequence because he has to know this to be any good as an engine guy and come to the conclusion in my head that if he does not know transmissions it is a signal that he is not fit to be an engine guy.

Sure, but that's not what happened. The real story, in contrast to the tweet, is that he didn't really know what a b-tree was. And if you're hiring an engine mechanic and they tell you they don't really know what a transmission is, well, that's a pretty big red flag.

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Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This by kls on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @01:40PM (#25049436)
Agreed and I don't know what he was applying for, I was just highlighting that this happens a lot in our industry where we misapply (not saying everyone in the tech industry) what we do with the ritual of insisting that applicants are worthy via a cargo cult process of ensuring that they too have the smartest guy in the room mentality.
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Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This by growse on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @12:15PM (#25048322)
I hate to entertain this bad analogy further than necessary, but knowing what a gearbox is in the field of cars is not even remotely near the same level as knowing what a b-tree is in the field of software engineering.
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Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This by treis on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @02:09PM (#25050095)
I guess we'll just have to disagree. They're a pretty basic data structure that's used quite often to solve a class of problems. And they're not that hard to learn. How they work is pretty simple and the reason to use them is pretty easy to grasp. I would say that there are few good software engineers out there that aren't clear on what they are at a basic level.
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Re:No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This by andi999 on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @01:41AM (#25056071)
I am curious. Which one do you think is more difficult to understand? (I couldnt tell)
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