Comment by runeblaze
21 days ago
To be honest my interviewers couldn’t sound less interested when I told them about my thoughts on Camus' Caligula and my love-hate relationship with Livy's History of Rome when I applied for jobs, same when I applied for PhDs.
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Similar things happened when I try to quote Dijkstra and "Out of the Tarpit" during coding interviews. I then started to quote Uncle Bob and they start to understand more. I am not sure people care about reading. Mind you this was the new grad job market.
You're not wrong. Another part of the problem is that industry itself is rampantly anti-intellectual in many ways. I can't tell you how much of an uphill battle it can be to get coworkers to even acknowledge a useful idea from academia or read papers, even at good companies.
Hell, the "industry languages" are just now more broadly adopting good language design ideas that have been around in academic contexts for decades.
I'm not sure how to do it, but we really need a return to a society in which intellectual curiosity and sophisticated debate are viewed as worthwhile—our incessant desire to just maximize profit as quickly as possible over anything else and the sharp division between "the intellectual domain" of academy and "the real world" of industry needs to blur and evaporate.