Zoho Don't Need No Stinking Ph.D. Programmers

theodp writes "When it comes to tech academic credentials, Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has The Right Stuff: a Ph.D. in EE from Princeton. But Vembu has eschewed Google's Army-of-Ph.D.s approach to software development in favor of tapping into the ranks of high school grads who would not normally go to college for Zoho. Seeing his youngest brother succeed at programming without a college degree convinced Vembu that others could follow that example with the proper training and guidance. And studying the best employees in his own company led to another epiphany: 'What if the college degree itself is not really that useful?' thought Vembu. 'What if we took kids after high school, train them ourselves?'"

Comments

Re:Finally

[AlgorithMan]

Apparently you don't have a CS degree, so why do you think you could even remotely understand what they are doing?

shure, kernelizations, branching-vector minimization, modelling things as graphs and using matching- or networkflow algorithms seems like bad programming, because these things need far more code than a simple backtracking algorithm (so these guys are wasting time and stealing money from their employer, right?). but these things make the difference between "applicable" and "too slow".

Without a CS degree, you won't even understand why.

or take parsers - you'd probably write very simple parsers. e.g. for configuration files of the form
property1 value1
property2 value2
you'd probably just extract the strings from a stream and do lots of if(str1 == "property1") { property1 = converter(str2);} else if(...

I'd use lots and lots of gotos, which would seem like bad programming to you (because you've been told that goto=bad), but I would have written it as an automata, which is FAR faster than your stuff (and for huge database programs, this is again the difference between "fast enough" and "to slow"). Using this technique I've written one of the fastest XML parsers there are...