Deal. You promise?

Since you're here, what do you feel like is a bigger constraint for Google (or the worldwide technical economy) - software engineering discipline or computer science fundamentals? I understand that you work in research, but for a hugely profitable company, so you have the insight to give a good answer.

Promise.

Good question. I think the engineering discipline part is much harder. I'm not sure that is because the problems really are harder: messier, ill-defined, changing over time; or whether it is that the academic community has focused on more well-defined formal/fundamental questions and mostly nailed them, so what we're left with is the harder messier stuff. Certainly it is easier for me to find someone to hire fresh out of college who has excellent CS fundamentals than to find someone with strong engineering discipline. And while my title included "Research", we all work very closely with Engineering.

Having no formal CS education (I consider myself a coder, not a programmer) I found your spell checker example to be intimidatingly beautiful. It feels like learning to play guitar and hearing Hendrix play: it's fun to do it but kind of depressing knowing I'll never come close.

and I hope you keep teaching as well! it was a real pleasure taking CS 221 from you, I hope everyone can be so lucky in the future :)

sounds like you had a pretty awesome attic growing up! all I had was my sister's old REO Speedwagon LPs

It's a deal!