As you grow up you learn there's no such thing as a technical meritocracy. Linux is the dictator because he has political dominance. Part of why he has that is technical competency, but most of it is because he created the project (which requires technical competency) and never fucked it up enough to lose that inertia.
There's a tech meritocracy there. I used to work in a submodule and the meritocracy was clear: beginner -> builds reputation -> solid contributor -> sub|co|maintainer. Linus's role was largely transparent, merging contributions rather than dictating them. I only saw emails from him when our changes broke other parts of the system.
Yep, this is tiresome. Antirez (Redis author) was going to write an alternative to HN, I'm looking forward to that. To this point, I think that a simple Bayesian span detector could help a lot.
I share your point of view, but live coding these days are just beyond that testing programming skills. You must know by heart the most common algorithms out there and design solutions that might involve two or three of them to solve a problem in 30 minutes.
Sometimes you spend the whole time trying to figure out how to solve the puzzle that don't even have time to show that you can - actually - code.
> You must know by heart the most common algorithms out there and design solutions that might involve two or three of them to solve a problem in 30 minutes.
You're not going to pass every interview. Some of them are truly outlandish, and require all of the above.
What you need is the technical knowledge to translate requirements into a loose pattern like "This looks like a search problem", then have the charisma (or more accurately, practice) to walk the interviewer through how each search algorithm you know could apply there. Then of course be able to actually write some code.
I've passed interviews where I had never heard of the datastructure they wanted me to solve it with; I just walked them through the tradeoffs of every data structure that I knew applied to it instead.
I'm a person just like you, I have dozens of side-projects around. The difference is that I've never went "far" enough to buy domains for any of those.
But I have a decent half-baked AI based investment portfolio manager, one month of hard work (nights/weekends) dreaming of selling it for a bank. Projects of such complexity are impossible for people stuck in the ordinary life (job/family). PS: I'm not complaining - I love my family. But it demands energy.
If those 48 scholars meet the following three criteria, then you should be concerned: Top university && Top researcher && Important field.