Flame Gone Wrong on Yegge's blog
Jeezuschrise I have never seen a better own in my life!!!
Context: this is going down in the comments of Steve Yegge's legendary "Go Get That Job At Google" essay. It's a great essay, and you should read it if you haven't, but needless to say it stirred up a lot of, *ahem*, emotions. Like was on display in this hilarious ad hominem attack from user "Noop":
Why I Would Never Hire Steve Yegge:
I'm quite sure that less than 10% of all software developers in this world are able to understand big-O complexity, n*log(n) sorting algorithms, hashtable implementations, graph theory, n-ary trees, NP-completeness, mutexes and semaphores. But Steve states that (for him) this is all basic knowledge, and that his requirements for candidates are not much different from those of any other software company. Now, if this was really true then 90% of the software developers in this world would not be able to find themselves a new job at this time, if they needed to. As this is definately not the case -- millions of them are changing jobs every year, despite all their shortcomings -- Steve's statement is evidently false. I know companies that hire demented trolls only because they look a lot like software developers, and they know which side of the computer they need to bang with their club. (And in my own interviews, I prefer socially-aware software engineers with common sense over uebergeeks from outer space. But that's another story.) Therefore... 1 point off for tunnel vision, distorted sense of reality and false reasoning. I can't abide know-it-alls....
Anyone who misspells the name of one of the greatest thinkers in the history of our Software Engineering discipline must be turned down immediately. No matter how many sorting algorithms he knows by heart. Now, I wouldn't mind if people accidentally referred to Stevey Yiggo. That would be understandable. But come on, misspelling Edsger W. Dijkstra is quite something else! -- Therefore... not 1 but 2 points off. Because Dijkstra was Dutch, just like me.
That's five points in the negative, mr. Yegge. Thank you for coming, that will be it. Don't call us, we'll call you. Please leave the markers on the table. Thank you.
Well, in all it's dunning-kruger snideness that ending is pretty sweet, lol. "That's five points in the negative, mr. Yegge...". I think I can understand his mental state when he posted this (see: raging nerd boner). But little did our intrepid poster know, he would soon receive a wedgie that would ruin his reputation on nerd blogs far and wide...
<from user "Unknown">
Jurgen said: "Anyone who misspells the name of one of the greatest thinkers in the history of our Software Engineering discipline must be turned down immediately."
You should Google around and see what Dijkstra said about "software engineers" (hint: he put it in scare-quotes, too).
It's also odd that you don't think that programmers need to know big-O notation or n log n sorting algorithms (!) but still have kind words for Dijkstra. Another hint: the kindness would not be mutual.
If you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, you're just an Eclipse macro that happens to breathe. Educate yourself.
P.S. I enjoyed this comment, too. Not a flame, but a gentle reminder to all the people whining about steve's/google's high standards.
<from user "Noam Moor">
"For example, do the people who work on Gmail have to memorize all of that "baseline" stuff you listed?"
I'm intimidated by the amount of complexity in Gmail, as i think about it. Like everything else in Google, it is a distributed application, with millions of users, each of which has gigabytes of emails stored. Emails are interconnected between conversations and between users; Conversations are interconnected between users; Attachments are interconnected between emails and between users; Everything is stored in some sort of a grid, possibly in an efficient manner (no need to save the attachment for both the sender and the receiver).
What have we? A graph of email conversations modeled in a distributed storage system. All the text is scanned in favor of presenting relevant ads, which is not the easiest thing in the world. If any part of this gigantic system is implemented inefficiently, the whole thing becomes much too slow for use by millions of people. And let's not forget that the UI and the server/UI communication are written in a subset of Java that is compiled to Javascript, which I am sure is a method developed specifically for Gmail. So all in all, I'd say yes, the people who're working on Gmail do need to be proficient in Computer Science. It is just not possible to create such an application without deeply knowing what you are doing.