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> I would invite you to consider the possibility that you are coming into a situation with a pro-academia bias that creates the reality you find yourself in. That's not at all unusual for someone who's worked at Google. That's a very good point and I have actually been very careful to consider that. There's still a tiny chance that it's possible, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case. The fact that we ended up hiring this other guy against my wishes gives me a nice little counter to confirmation bias. He's pretty horrible even on the stuff where he has a huge (theoretical) advantage over me and the other engineer, due to having much more real-world experience with it. You just can't work around a lack of creativity, conscientiousness, and problem-solving skills. For example, I set up most of our non-core-logic systems stuff by the seat of my pants (servers, DBs, caches, etc etc etc). I got roughly zero experience with this stuff at Google because the tooling was so excellent and taken care of by large, expert teams. It's been a great learning experience both in terms of familiarity with the tools and the trade-offs that come with small size/too much to do. Learning these skills is part of why I wanted to try a small company. Since this guy has proven himself utterly useless at anything even remotely involving engineering, he's been reduced to marginal changes to this kind of systems stuff, setting up things that are very low-priority so far. He still manages to mess up most of these! Every time he pushes a config change, or sets up a new service, or does _anything_, something is broken and I need to fix it. Most recently, he burned through a few thousand dollars in a couple weeks by making an entirely unnecessary switch away from our key-value store without noticing that his new set up used a dozen beefy reserved instances. I don't have 100% confidence in my view here since my sample is so small, but the original point I was arguing against was that "years of coding will teach you mathematical understanding" and that this obviates a math degree. Everything I've seen from different vantage points has pointed to this not being true. It's entirely possible for someone with a decade of engineering experience to be almost utterly useless (cf Jeff Atwood's old post about "senior engineers" being unable to FizzBuzz). |