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David

It was fun reading your discussion. But as we can all see — while some things we agree on, others we do not, and we all have different expectations of different perceived experience for a candidate whether it is ourselves or of others. Every tool has a scenario that it cannot cover. I’ve come to think that it’s reductionist to think that the entire industry and hiring in tech is just broken.

It’s just not perfect and there is something to be said about how much the bar has been raised with regard to algo problems at big companies. Don’t get me wrong, a healthy understanding and knowing what tools are available and being able to talk through a problem and how one might tackle it should lend a lot of insight already. The expectation of a working and near optimal solution is a little absurd.

I think a stupendous point was made about “not resting on laurels”. I’m a little shocked that we don’t do the following — 1. baseline capability of understanding and knowledge around some topics, 2. Evaluate quality of existing works, and 3. The desire to learn. I want to really emphasize that last point, because we used to be able to say that it isn’t measurable. But it is! For someone with experience, there is likely activity on their GitHub with a history of things they’ve dabbled in and a record of projects they’ve engaged with either by contribution, questions, or bug reports. Sure, there are stints where a particular person works on only proprietary software or even a completely different VCS, but as one of you had stated, such opacity lends itself to deeper inquiry