
$20,000 Per Source Line of Code - nreece
http://stevekrenzel.com/20000-per-sloc
======
mynameishere
_...right before I had graduated from my undergrad and was looking for
something to do after graduation._

 _...at that point in my career. I had experience at Princeton's Plasma
Physics Labs writing data analysis software for nucelar fusion experiments,
experience working on artificial intelligence and natural language processing
at Google, had worked at a defense startup, and had over 7 years at a lawfirm_

huh? All before graduating?

 _I had done a little over 30 interviews, and had always gotten an offer_

Who the hell does 30 interviews and rejects every last offer? WTF? And then he
can't write a function he's already written "hundreds of times"? Am I reading
this wrong?

~~~
sgk284
I'm the author. Yes, all that happened during my undergrad (Except my
experience at the lawfirm, which started in high school and continued through
college. I handled all of their technology related stuff. I wound up doing a
lot of consulting for various other firms too through recommendations).

The 30 interviews were all the interviews I've ever done, like jackowayed
said.

As far as writing the function goes, yea I was just having an off day, which
was the point of the post.

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cduan
So...if he had gotten the code right, he would have taken this job _and_ his
current job? Because that's the only way his five lines of code are worth
$20,000 apiece.

~~~
jcl
Yes, and he'd have to hold the job for exactly one year, then quit. A better
title would have been "Five lines of code cost me a job interview", which is
so unremarkable as to not be worth reading.

The most surprising thing in the article, really, is that he managed to have
thirty interviews _without_ having an experience like this.

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swombat
This is a pretty good example of why asking people to write code in an
interview is a pretty poor way to measure their fitness for the job...

~~~
philwelch
I've always felt that writing code _on a whiteboard_ is a crap way to
interview people, and I feel that way every time I'm interviewed that way. At
least give me a text editor so my mental associations come back to me quick
enough.

~~~
shrughes
I don't understand this. What do you mean by mental associations?

~~~
philwelch
I write all of my code with a keyboard, in a text editor. If I have a keyboard
and a text editor my brain remembers how to write code better than if I have a
whiteboard and a marker, because I don't write code on whiteboards.

The brain works this way, which is why you feel sleepy when you go to bed
(unless you spend a lot of time in bed not sleeping). It's a type of
compartmentalization, well known in psychology.

------
tvon
I wouldn't hire this guy, what good is a coder that has to have 3 RedBulls and
can't do anything productive until the afternoon?

If you can't represent your abilities away from a computer on a whiteboard or
in a conversation to a reasonable extent, you are not as good as you would
like to think you are, and the guy who _can_ do it is better than you.

He didn't miss the job because he couldn't answer the questions, he missed the
job because someone else could.

[edit: Okay, I might be a bit grumpy, but I think the gist of my comment is
spot-on]

~~~
sgk284
The point of my post was that coincidences happen. I had an off day (which we
all have) that also happened to coincide with an interview. I usually don't
need energy drinks or the afternoon (although many software engineers perform
better in the evening).

I usually can represent my abilities, and execute on them just fine, in any
context. This day was a statistical outlier compared to my average day. If
this was routine for me, it wouldn't have seemed so unusual.... but screwing
up really badly once after nailing it 30 other times seemed interesting to me.

~~~
tvon
Hmm, re-reading things, I seem to have been caught up in a thread here
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565038>) and in my mindless annoyance I
mistakenly applied the thread logic to the post. Apologies.

~~~
sgk284
None taken, we all have our off-moments ;)

~~~
tvon
Well played, Sir. Well played ;)

