Feeling Somewhat Stupid
I was reading Brandon’s blog tonight to get to the Steve Yegge article on Interviewing Ruby Programmers. And honestly, after reading Yegge’s article, especially the interview questions, I have to admit that I feel like a real hack. Not the good kind of hack (hacker) in terms of the guru that everyone looks to. I feel like a hapless programmer who barely keeps his head above water. I tried to imagine answering the questions for Python instead of Ruby and honestly couldn’t do much with it. Yes, I can pick it apart a bit and I can compare it to other languages. I’ve taught others (or at least gotten them started) on Python. But there are still tons of things I don’t understand. And it seems like there is an endless waterfall of information and complexity and no matter how hard I try, I can’t even swim upstream to get to anywhere near the waterfall. I am so distracted by the everyday tasks of work and home life that I don’t see how I will ever “catch up” if that’s even a possible task. But then again, that’s what “picayune” is all about – small, trivial, of little importance.
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When Python (or Ruby) start feeling complicated, I’d back up and start asking why. There are new language features that are a level of complexity above the norm, but most of these are submitted by or written for library implementors (Stackless, Twisted) to make their life easier. Writing in a scripting language shouldn’t be (and isn’t) that complicated.
Frankly, I think these interview techniques are bogus for most companies … at my old company, if I could’ve found somebody to answer all those questions, we wouldn’t have been able to pay them enough money to take the job anyway. I’m assuming Amazon.com can pretty much pick and choose who they want.
Of course, this could all be an elaborate smoke screen that my mind has come up with to cope with my mediocrity. If so, it’s working.