Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pchristensen 5409 days ago
Deal. You promise?

Since you're here, what do you feel like is a bigger constraint for Google (or the worldwide technical economy) - software engineering discipline or computer science fundamentals? I understand that you work in research, but for a hugely profitable company, so you have the insight to give a good answer.

1 comments

Promise.

Good question. I think the engineering discipline part is much harder. I'm not sure that is because the problems really are harder: messier, ill-defined, changing over time; or whether it is that the academic community has focused on more well-defined formal/fundamental questions and mostly nailed them, so what we're left with is the harder messier stuff. Certainly it is easier for me to find someone to hire fresh out of college who has excellent CS fundamentals than to find someone with strong engineering discipline. And while my title included "Research", we all work very closely with Engineering.