[slpsys]

Uh, I still do? The person writing the article seems to think that if you can approximate how many piano tuners there are in New York, you automagically get that Google dream job. They're both tough, but very different, processes. I can only hope the author doesn't work in the business side of software, as they clearly suffer from Shit's Easy Syndrome.

[jimmyjim]

Ah, really? That's a Google question?

I'd love to hear what a good answer to that question is. Anyone up for it?

[zck]

A good answer is something that gets you to the right order of magnitude that would be absolutely correct if your assumptions are correct. For example, the number of piano tuners in New York:

So there are eight million people in NYC. Let's say that each household is two people, on average. So four million households. Because NYC is crowded, not many people have pianos in their homes -- let's say one in fifty. So 80,000 pianos. Let's double that to account for the schools and concert halls, so 160,000 pianos. On average, let's say a piano is tuned once every other year. So each year, there are 80,000 tunings.

A piano has 88 strings, and let's say a trained tuner could tune about two per minute, so a piano takes forty-five minutes to tune. If the piano tuner knows where he's going, and makes appointments accordingly, let's say it takes another forty-five minutes to get from one appointment to the next. So ninety minutes is one piano tuning. One tuner works 50 weeks a year, 40 hours a week, so 2000 hours, or 1333 tunings. So 80,000 tunings / 1333 tunings per tuner = 60 tuners in NYC.

Of course, that assumes each tuner works full-time. If we assume there are part-time tuners, that number only goes up. I'd round to 100.

You see, the point isn't to get the exact number; the point is to show that you can figure out impossible problems.

[brianobush]

found this explanation from steve yegge: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html

"Shit's Easy Syndrome".

You know. As in, shit's easy. If it's easy to imagine, then it's easy to implement. Programming is just turning imagination into reality. You can churn through shit as fast as the conscious mind can envision it. Any programmer who can't keep up is an underperformer who needs to be "topgraded" to make room for incredible new college hires who can make it happen, no matter what "it" happens to be, even if they have to work 27 hours a day, which of course they can because by virtue of being new college hires, they have no social lives and no spouses or significant others, and they probably smoke a lot of crack from being in the dorms so they can stay awake for weeks at a time.

[kurtosis]

Sorry for asking, but what's "Shit's Easy Syndrome"?

[slpsys]

it's a term I lifted from steve yegge's [long-winded] software blog (RIP) - http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

[peregrine]

The short of it is when a Business man comes in and says "Can you build this facebook clone with integrations to our CRM, shits easy. See you in a week."