Chris Sells, a software developer and former Microsoft employee, writes about programming, Microsoft history, and tech events.
HN mostly links his Feynman-at-Microsoft satire, which commenters cite in discussions of the 'why are manhole covers round' interview question.
Agreed, but that is why I'm ... basically complaining, I suppose. Feynman's reputation was never "dude who comes up with lots of solutions". Invoking Feynman is for when:
* There is a difference between the name of the thing and what it does (very much his style).
* When bureaucracy is disconnected from physical reality (alluding to the Challenger incident).
* When a blisteringly intelligent person can just get it right by thinking from first principles (dude was wicked smart).
Which is why the original article cited [0] worked so well. Feynman's name was being invoked for someone who immediately and insightfully tore the pro-forma question apart as having a faulty premise where the name of the thing didn't imply it was round. It is still words in his mouth, but that is on character for Feynman stereotypes.
Throwing out lots of ideas that don't quite work isn't really a good time to invoke the name.
[0] http://sellsbrothers.com/12395
I never meant I didn't like that kind of riddle - I really do enjoy most of them.
But I don't think they have any use in an interview setting, since they too often just test if the interviewee is up to date on the latest list of interview questions (Eg. http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/default.aspx?content=question.htm#riddles) or not.
> a number of reasons why it was round
Except that question in particular is a fairly silly one. A satirical rendition exists that illustrates why, and happens to have been discussed long ago on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569897) but apparently the original article has moved (https://sellsbrothers.com/12395).
Chris Sells added reference counting to the open source "Rotor" release years ago. This was to test whether GC overhead was indeed an overhead over deterministic finalization.
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/writing/refcount_rotor.doc
I'll let you come to your own conclusions about the results :)
There's another, shorter one, answering the "why are manhole covers round" question: http://www.sellsbrothers.com/posts/details/12395
That reminded me to reread "If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft"
https://sellsbrothers.com/12395