I wish the HN title was "How to effectively conduct programming interviews", like it is in the article.
I find Casey Muratori completely insufferable and this title riled me up, but the content is actually pretty good. My perception of him is that he is a good engineer, but generally overconfident and unwilling to approach other peoples' viewpoints with an open mind. The current title played right into my biases.
(At the time of writing, the HN title is "Casey Muratori: I can always tell a good programmer in an interview")
Any sensible person should probably be riled up -- or at least dissatified -- when an article contains this:
> With this approach, he claims he can always understand if someone is a competent programmer, and he has never seen it fail.
In this kind of situation, never seeing something fail is not a good sign. Evaluation metrics are noisy. One has to accept reality: no process is perfect. Better to admit it and actively seek out failures.
Statistical evaluations matter. Getting some objective distance matters.
> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman
When he introduces himself to a new audience on podcasts his standard intro is that he is not a performance guy, and he refers to his past colleagues who he learned a lot from as being on a higher tier than him.
He preaches reasonable performance instead of completely shitting the bed or optimization to the maximum (although he also teaches that).
Look at the JetBeans Java challenge on YouTube where he coaches a (imo below average) programmer. He is very kind. So your assessment just seems unfair to me.
Yeah, maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know him and I’ve never interacted with him personally. That’s just the vibe that I’ve got after seeing various pieces of his stuff over the years. Just trying to describe how the title made me feel personally.
I find Casey Muratori completely insufferable and this title riled me up, but the content is actually pretty good. My perception of him is that he is a good engineer, but generally overconfident and unwilling to approach other peoples' viewpoints with an open mind. The current title played right into my biases.
(At the time of writing, the HN title is "Casey Muratori: I can always tell a good programmer in an interview")