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What You Need To Know
AI Notes
A November 2004 rant that Steve himself files as connective tissue, bridging his grumpy "Bob Paradox" piece and the "Practicing Programming" tutorial he was preparing next. It spends a surprising share of its length nowhere near software: wet dogs and microwaves, a tape jammed in a VCR and the polish sausage you would never use to free it, a chihuahua that turns out to be a Mexican sewer rat. The detours are the argument — software judgment here is ordinary common sense, accumulated the same slow way, which is why a candidate can be otherwise well-qualified and still sunk by not knowing the odds of a coin flip. Steve swears there's a "famously funny story" behind that interview, then declines to tell it.
Some of the confident asides have not aged gracefully: every developer supposedly needs yacc or antlr, and imperative programming won't "last much longer (in the grand 400-year Scheme of things)." The pun outlived the prediction. Also worth the scroll is the lone preserved reader comment, where a recent grad politely dismantles one of the common-sense items, arguing that inheritance really means "can-be-treated-as-if-it-were-a" — a better objection than the essay is set up to answer. Steve's later interviewing pieces get prescriptive; this one is still thinking out loud about what to test for, and it's more likable for that.
Related listings
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2004
The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions
The 2004 piece that made Steve famous in interviewing circles. Five Essentials gives the specific questions; What You Need To Know is the theory of why those particular questions catch the lack of common sense the bar is supposed to measure.
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2008
Get That Job at Google
Three years on, with Steve inside Google. The advice has hardened into a canon; the CS-degree-equivalent list in this 2005 piece is one of its direct ancestors.
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2005
Done, and Gets Things Smart
Same era, opposite end of the spectrum. Done-and-Gets-Things-Smart is the rant about senior people who clear the bar conceptually but never finish anything; What You Need To Know is the rant about people who finish things but lack the conceptual basis to finish them well.