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Ask HN: Work for mgr who's never heard of Joel Spolsky?

7 points by listenallyall ↗ HN
Scenario: technical interview, question arises something regarding Unicode text in memory.

Interviewee: "hmmm, wish I could ask Joel Spolsky or at least remember his Unicode essay..." Interviewer (potential future manager): "Joe LaSpoli? Who?" Interviewee: "Joel Spolsky. You know, Joel on Software, co-founded Stack Overflow?" Interviewer: "Hmmm, cool, I'll have to check him out."

If interviewee is ultimately offered a job, is this a red flag or no big deal?

23 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 61.4 ms ] thread
mtmail
Not a big deal at all. I'm sure the manager can name drop 10 other people, like book authors, the interviewee never heard of.
impendia
I'm a big fan of reading Joel Spolsky's essays. Usually when I should be grading papers, or something like that, and decide to procrastinate instead.

Perhaps your interviewer is better at resisting procrastination than me? (I should be polishing off a grant proposal now as I write this, but here I am commenting on HN instead..)

Some positions may require an extensive knowledge of who's who and what the trends are in the industry, but I would guess a technical position is not one of them.

Not a red flag, in my opinion.

codingdave
Not a red flag - Joel was much more at the forefront of "tech pop culture" a decade ago than he is now. So your potential manager may just be younger, which is not a red flag. Or maybe he was busy 10-15 years ago and didn't keep up on blogs. Also not a red flag.
quickthrower2
No. Some people don’t follow the pop culture of hackers, but are still solid coders.
s0sa
Nope. The only red flag I can see here is with the interviewee thinking this might be a red flag.
mi_lk
100 this. Some people seriously need to get out of bubbles they put themselves in
ac2u
No.

Not a flag, red, green or otherwise.

I'm not accusing you of doing this, but some people that are well versed in the cultural hacker scene constantly play out an obnoxious variation of this in the form of:

"You've never heard of X? Really? C'mon, X, the inventor of Y?"

It does not endear them to their colleagues.

I'm happy to talk about figures in computing with anyone else who shares a similar interest, but I make zero correlation of their competencies whether they know of a certain figure or not.

wharfjumper
Been in tech for 3 decades. Use Stack Overflow almost daily. Embarrassed to admit I've never before heard of Joel Spolsky.
forgetfulness
His fame came from essays about running Software businesses, harping on the importance of hiring only the top talent, he offered how they wrote a bugtracker on an in-house language built on VBScript as an example of the feats such savants can accomplish.
hardex
Hope you didn't take the job.

Saves them a lot of pain in the ass.

brudgers
If you decide it is a red flag, it is a red flag.

That's how red flags work.

Anyway some red flags say "uneven pavement."

Some say "bridge out."

How you treat each of them depends on what you are driving, where you are going, and why you are going there.

Good luck.

gdulli
This person has made a conscious effort to learn if this particular red flag is silly and they deserve an answer that yes, it is. There are few roads that become impassable based on these circumstances, and some variables are more distracting than helpful to navigation. More people should be willing to question their biases and when it happens it shouldn't be dismissed with essentially a tautology.
brudgers
What about when the job is a step up the career ladder?

What if the job offers better work life balance?

How about if their current job sucks?

Did “cool I’ll check it out” feel sincere?

Is not knowing about Joel signify a serious cultural misfit or not?

How does the op operate socially?

The meaning of the event in the context of reality is always going to be “it depends” because reality is complex and complicated and messy.

RcouF1uZ4gsC
In my opinion, Verity Stob wrote a much better essay on Unicode than Joel Spolsky

https://www.theregister.com/2013/10/04/verity_stob_unicode/

Does the interviewee know about Verity Stop?

I think that is just as much of a red flag as not knowing about Joel Spolskly (pretty much none)

On the other hand, if you don't know about Donald Knuth (at least heard the name) I would be concerned.

listenallyall
OP here. Yours appears to be the only response which acknowledges some kind of subtlety in the question. It doesn't ask whether the interviewer is familiar with one specific blog post Joel wrote, or whether they know who founded Stack Overflow, or whether they agree with any of his ideas. It's that they never heard of Joel at all, as in, never heard the name and never came across any of his writing.

You contrast Spolsky against Knuth, that's the subtlety part. There has to be someone prominent enough, that if a software engineer said they'd never heard of that person, you'd scratch your head and wonder what's up. Is Knuth sufficiently prominent? Dennis Ritchie? Sergey Brin? Linus Torvalds? Bill Gates?

brudgers
Spolsky is not sufficiently prominent even though Stackoverflow is.

Same with Brin and google.

catlover76
> Yours appears to be the only response which acknowledges some kind of subtlety in the question.

There is no "nuance" in your question. Your question was pretty black and white; in your own words, the question is whether "they []ever heard of Joel at all, as in, never heard the name and never came across any of his writing."

listenallyall
Yes, the stated question is about one specific individual. But unlike most of the answers posted so far, "RcouF1uZ4gsC"'s answer acknowledges that there are people for whom, yes, it might be a red flag. As opposed to your answer above, which states "strange enough to think that something like this matters," implying there is absolutely nobody that might raise a concern.

As I mentioned, if the interviewer never heard of Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates, would you really say "it doesn't matter?" If yes, then I kind of wonder about your judgment a little bit. If no, then the question could be re-worded as, "Is Joel Spolsky sufficiently famous or influential among professional software engineers that you'd hesitate before working for someone who had never heard of him," which is a more nuanced question, as it asks the respondent to place him along some spectrum and to determine where the cutoff point is.

cellis
I mean, Joel Spolsky is just like, some guy. Even Paul Graham is not exactly noteworthy in computer science or software engineering, except to a relatively small cadre of engineers that want to build startups (there are about 27 million software engineers in the world). Plus there's always new blood coming in that have never heard of who you think is important and might have learned via a completely different pathway.
listenallyall
I don't want to put words in your mouth. Are you implying that if you were considering joining a startup, it might be a red flag if the founder had never heard of Paul Graham?
cellis
I think the people are less important to know about than the concepts or ideas they've promoted that may have stood the test of time.
catlover76
No red flag in terms of a bad manager; red flag that reflects poorly on an interviewee who is strange enough to think that something like this matters.