Ryan Peterman

What makes your language slow is you have lots of stuff you might have to go confirm at runtime.

And R is just incredibly pervasively like this.

Really what drove me nuts was there were just a ton of people

fundamentally wanted to be professors or postdocs and were in a PhD program.

And they were like, well, if I fail out, I'll go into industry.

And this like, one is that you would interact with people during interviews who like clearly didn't want to be there, just like so unambiguously did not want to be there and clearly viewed this as like a failure that they were interviewing.

And you're like, well, that's not really like a positive sign that we want to hire someone who like doesn't seem like they're going to enjoy the job.

But in addition, a bunch of people, and this is what drove me so insane, because I think it's like all parties involved in the academic system hurt students doing this, is that like so many people just assume that when they finally decided to get an industry position, it was going to be trivial.

And then they didn't find it trivial.

I think a lot of academic people were like, well, smart people are in academia and the dumb people are in industry.

So if I need to go compete with the dumb people, it will be easy.

And I think there was a lot of that.

But, you know, there was a person, I mean, I gave you an example.

There was a person who was like effectively a CS professor who I interviewed.

And this person, like, could not figure out how to pass values between the various functions that they were calling in the interview.

Like, literally, they were like, what I would do is I would call this function.

It would print out in the REPL.

And it would read it as a human.

And then I would go, like, type it into this other piece of code.

And I was like, oh, you are better at programming than this, right?