They don't even know the fundamentals • Hacker News Board

Re: They don't even know the fundamentals

#321

Post by lbayes » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 11:43 AM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #79

lbayes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also an argument here about having (and signalling) respect for one's peers, craft and tools. The keyboard is a tool. To me, it feels disrespectful for a person to expect these high wages when they don't even make the moderate effort involved in learning to use this tool efficiently. In my experience, this usually signals that a person isn't actually interested in continuously improving, feels overly entitled…

> The keyboard is a tool. Yes, but one of many. > If you can't type, you're going to waste a lot of people's time and they may be too polite to say anything, but it's frustrating for everyone around you. I don't think in my career I have ever been alerted to anyone's typing speed being slow. Yes, I've heard endless noise about "the perfect keyboard" and the ins and outs of spring types and junk. But I've never notice…

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

I agree that some (maybe lots of?) people feel differently about this and of course, that's okay too.

To be clear, I'm not saying anyone needs to type 120 WPM, I'm talking about a single finger on each hand, eyes down, hunting for the next key to press.

Over the 20+ years of my career, I've been exposed to hundreds, maybe thousands of different folks doing different kinds of computer work.

And yes, I agree that there are likely people who can kind of get the job done without being able to operate a keyboard efficiently. I also agree, that it helps a lot if they're nice to work with.

But I have not yet met a single hacker who has demonstrable and deep knowledge of computers and the software that runs them who cannot type.

I'm sure they must exist, and it wouldn't surprise me if Donald Knuth himself dropped into this thread to let me know that he hunts and pecks!

I'm just saying, that I have not personally met or observed someone operating at the highest levels of this field who cannot type with a reasonable speed.

[update] Almost forgot about Gatekeeping, Yes!

Gatekeeping is an essential part of interviewing. In fact, that's the entire point. We interview people for roles with the specific intent of bringing on people who we believe (or at least hope) have higher competence and closing the gate to people who have lower competence.

It's incredibly difficult work and it's not perfect and we have a lot of work to do, to make it better and more inclusive, but expecting competence in basic, role-relevant skills is unambiguously reasonable IMO.

Re: They don't even know the fundamentals

#322

Post by lbayes » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

confidantlake wrote: post #256

lbayes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also an argument here about having (and signalling) respect for one's peers, craft and tools. The keyboard is a tool. To me, it feels disrespectful for a person to expect these high wages when they don't even make the moderate effort involved in learning to use this tool efficiently. In my experience, this usually signals that a person isn't actually interested in continuously improving, feels overly entitled…

But how do you know if someone has dyslexia or is just not making an effort? Or has wrist, shoulder, whatever problems? Unless the typing is hurting their output, who cares? And at that point it is not the typing speed that is the problem, but that their output is low.

To be clear, I'm not insinuating that anyone needs to type 120WPM. I'm talking about single-finger, head down, hunting for the location of a key.

People with mild to moderate dyslexia (in my experience) and people with injuries are generally able to demonstrate competence with the keyboard and computer operation.

I have dealt with moderate to severe RSI, and I have worked with a relatively large number of people dealing with RSI over the years and in my experience injuries don't mask operational competence. These behaviors look different from, "where was that key again?"

Dyslexia often surfaces in a variety of early communications and over the years, working with some especially brilliant people challenged with dyslexia, I've learned to assume (early on) that typos are not a signal for carelessness, but potential indicators of dyslexia.

I'm aware dyslexia is a spectrum, and at the extreme it can be fully debilitating for some activities. I haven't had much exposure to that cohort, but I would be happy to make reasonable accommodations and certainly would not consider it disqualifying.

Thanks for bringing this up, I think it's helpful to be able to clarify these details!

Re: They don't even know the fundamentals

#323

Post by Corrado » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 6:39 AM UTC

sriku wrote: post #313

scythmic_waves wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though he does admit [1] > So I had learned already that names don't constitute knowledge... That's caused me a certain trouble since because I refuse to learn the name of anything... What [my father] forgot to tell me was that the knowing the names of things is useful if you wanna talk to somebody else. I think an interview might count :) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_7j72CVlc

It's been sort of 18 years since I started using another heuristic - if you can google for something, don't bother requiring a candidate to know it. Not an exact principle, but somewhat like that .. in that I'm more curious about how a person thinks in an interview than what he/she knows. This change in me was triggered when a candidate came in for a dev interview and we were doing the usual whiteboard problem thing…

It actually might be more informative. If a candidate, that had never heard the term "ACID", was able to Google it and talk intelligently about it I would be most impressed and it would probably earn them a next step. In fact, that might be a good practice to try out. Find a related term that the candidate wasn't familiar with and have them research it. Give them X minutes to reason about the term and then have a discussion about it. This is a thing we all do, every day. You can't possibly know everything so you must know how to find out about new things and how to think about them.