<story><title>When Jeff Bezos decided not to become a physicist [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnV6EM-wzY</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ken</author><text>Also known as: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.c2.com&amp;#x2F;?FeynmanAlgorithm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.c2.com&amp;#x2F;?FeynmanAlgorithm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this case, Bezos saw firsthand how a brain teaser could be answered by &amp;quot;seen something similar once before&amp;quot; much more easily than &amp;quot;worked on it on a team for several hours&amp;quot;.  Isn&amp;#x27;t this exactly the sort of brain teaser that we hate seeing in tech interviews?&lt;p&gt;This one was bad enough that Bezos &lt;i&gt;left the field&lt;/i&gt;, yet Amazon (like every other software company) still asks these style of questions of its engineering candidates.</text></comment>
<story><title>When Jeff Bezos decided not to become a physicist [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnV6EM-wzY</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ZhuanXia</author><text>Everyone is jealous of someone. It is amusing to compare Bezos&amp;#x27;s awe at Yasantha to that of many of his engineers towards him - or for that matter, my awe of anyone who can pass Amazon&amp;#x27;s recruitment process.&lt;p&gt;See this except from a biography of Bezos:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;... To the amazement and irritation of employees, Bezos’s criticisms are almost always on target. Bruce Jones, a former Amazon supply chain vice president, describes leading a five-engineer team figuring out ways to make the movement of workers in fulfillment centers more efficient. The group spent nine months on the task, then presented their work to Bezos. “We had beautiful documents, and everyone was really prepared,” Jones says. Bezos read the paper, said, “You’re all wrong,” stood up, and started writing on the whiteboard.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;“He had no background in control theory, no background in operating systems,” Jones says. “He only had minimum experience in the distribution centers and never spent weeks and months out on the line.” But Bezos laid out his argument on the whiteboard, and “every stinking thing he put down was correct and true,” Jones says. “It would be easier to stomach if we could prove he was wrong, but we couldn’t. That was a typical interaction with Jeff. He had this unbelievable ability to be incredibly intelligent about things he had nothing to do with, and he was totally ruthless about communicating it.”&lt;p&gt;Yasantha is an interesting fellow, with contributions in wireless networking, AI, chip design and various other fields.&lt;p&gt;In this article Yasantha describes Bezos&amp;#x27;s legendary work ethic[1].&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Yasantha described how students once dared each other to complete a computer science assignment in a single line of coding. “Finally, I gave up and did this in 10 or so lines of code,” he added, “But I remember Jeff working through all night, in pursuit of the most compact solution, and turned in a two-line solution that was probably the shortest anyone could do…”&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;“It goes to prove that Jeff is tenacious, and will not give up like most of us would when presented with a challenge,” he said.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;“He sets his goals and sticks to them. I think that’s a quality that has made him who he is,” Yasantha added.&lt;p&gt;Think what it meant for someone such as him to give up on his dream to be a theoretical physicist.&lt;p&gt;Despite his tenaciousness he was forced to conclude there were levels of abstraction he could not reach through hard work.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.dailynews.lk&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;22&amp;#x2F;local&amp;#x2F;163321&amp;#x2F;lankan-solved-math-problem-amazon-founder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.dailynews.lk&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;22&amp;#x2F;local&amp;#x2F;163321&amp;#x2F;lankan-solve...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>