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I don't think being able to reverse engineer your project is actually a good qualification for hiring you, considering your employees don't need to do that.

Also, isn't she a high schooler/freshman? There's always internships but it's best to do other things before grinding those out.



If someone understands your codebase without your sources and docs - you can bet that they will also understand it with the help of those. Usually better, if the docs have any value.

And this is kind of a valuable skill, considering how many coders don't understand their codebase even with docs.


I did not follow parent’s reasoning either. They did something without any documentation at all.


It’s certainly true that such people are very capable, and would be good people to hire for many kinds of work. However corporate environments don’t typically like people who are willing to work around artificial restrictions. This particular skill set (which is what reverse engineering is) may even be (perceived as) a negative at a company like Apple.


Much of it (LLVM) is open source, and for the rest I don't think understanding the inputs and outputs is actually that closely related to being able to maintain the bits in the middle, or come up with new bits.

It's not a negative of course.


> I don't think being able to reverse engineer your project is actually a good qualification for hiring you,

Ask Mark Russinovich, now Azure CTO


I don't think any technical skills are a good way to pick someone for a leadership position.


So what is? The ability to bullshit everyone?


I would've said management experience.



Most employees would probably be well served being able to reverse engineer things. Sure, you might have docs on how your graphics pipeline works, but then you’re probably going to be looking at commercial software that runs on it.


Prevention of competition to reverse engineer something is valuable sometimes




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