News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: Where do I go from here? by nostrademons on Sunday May 31, 2009 @11:42PM (#635486)
> Don’t get me wrong, if you really work at it I’m sure you can do it but you are WAY behind the curve if you’re 20 years old and have done nothing but tinker with BASIC and C.

FWIW, many of my coworkers at Google had never written a line of code before they got to college.

Re:Ask HN: Where do I go from here? by ced on Monday June 01, 2009 @10:57AM (#636158)
How do they compare to those who have?
Re:Ask HN: Where do I go from here? by nostrademons on Monday June 01, 2009 @01:11PM (#636361)
As good or better, generally. For entry-level hires (which many of my coworkers were - like many big companies, Google likes to hire straight out of college), Google usually hires for smarts, and once you've been there a year or two, you can pick up all the solid engineering practices and company-specific knowledge. They have nothing to unlearn, which is unfortunately often the case with people who've come from more spaghetti-like codebases.

One observation though - and this is a gross generalization, and obviously doesn't apply to everyone. The people who never studied CS before college and never worked on outside projects tend to be less innovative, less willing to think outside the box. So they're more dependable engineers and often write cleaner code, but they're less likely to come up with a crazy idea or go beyond their established job description.

There are exceptions, of course. Wonder Wheel was done by someone who didn't program until he was a couple years into college, and was initially interested in being a filmmaker (and he's only a year or so out of college, so that's only 3-4 years total experience).