Nov 3, 2022

I Failed CNSS Interview

I failed CNSS interview twice, both on DEV and SA, due to my "incompetence on fundamental knowledge".

They're right: I've never truly known how a computer boots into an OS, or receives keyboard events bare-metal. I've skipped C and C++, jumping to Rust right from garbage-collected languages, only to know hardly anything about how memory management works. I've chosen coroutine and written an async Lua executor for my project without acknowledging where thread overhead is. Maybe I don't know computer science at all.

What I do know, though, is I am making things. I know how my ideas should work, and I turn them into reality. I don't really care about what's really going on in the kernel or something, I just know it may work. I finish them before I test them, and if one works best, it works best. It is called experiment.

Yes, these knowledges underneath is needed when you want to squeeze every bit of performance out of the code, or you want to be more theoretical to discover new paradigms. But, do know -- ideas come and go in a flash, while I can learn these things anytime, anywhere. Isn't creativity and learning skill more impressive than one's knowledge stash?

I'm not going to make myself an escapist when I can and should learn these details, and I'm not complaining the outcome. I'm just writing what I want to write.

Maybe I'm the one who can't invert a B-tree?