I'm 39 and I own a competitional geometry automation company, working with reverse engineering smooth NURBS curves from roughly scanned point clouds captured in the field from customer yachts. The result is a beautiful pattern for a new deck of flooring costing between 5 and 15 grand. We charge between $50 to $300 for this design process. My clients are the flooring manufacturers that outsource their design reverse engineering to me because that work is often very hard, and my algorithmic tooling and equality controls are the best in the industry. Eventually I'd like to launch our product as a software system, but for now I operate as a design outsourcing service. I develope our algorithmic tools and also do the design work.
I'm currently a single person startup without enough revenue to hire a dev helper. But there are two kinds of developer I would hire: business automation experts and computational geometry experts.
And if I interviewed a compgeo person, guess what algorithms I'd ask about?
That's right, I'd ask them to derive the Bernstein basis functions, implement Decasteljau's algorithm using LERPs, prove this gives us the same result as numerically evaluating Bernstein, calculate the algorithmic speedup, and remark on the numerical stability.
This is either very easy - the person cares about reticulating splines! Or it's impossible, signalling lack of domain knowledge.
That's why in this case I don't feel it's a riddle at all. It's one of the basic mathematical pillars our entire product line is being built on. Knowing I don't have to mentor you in that is going to be a big deal for me. Likewise knowing that I do have to mentor you might not be a deal-breaker, but requires accommodations, like putting you in a more Junior role, specifying the algorithmic portion of tasks much more stringently, and taking responsibility for our numerical or mathematical analysis.
That second scenario might indeed happen if I make enough money to hire a Dev assistant, but can't afford one trained in comp geo. I in that case I would still pop the Bernstein/Decasteljau question but not expect them to go in depth. Instead I would ask them to pledge to learn, and provide paid training sessions, both to enrich them with useful domain knowledge, and to eventually benefit our team.
Comments
I'm 39 and I own a competitional geometry automation company, working with reverse engineering smooth NURBS curves from roughly scanned point clouds captured in the field from customer yachts. The result is a beautiful pattern for a new deck of flooring costing between 5 and 15 grand. We charge between $50 to $300 for this design process. My clients are the flooring manufacturers that outsource their design reverse engineering to me because that work is often very hard, and my algorithmic tooling and equality controls are the best in the industry. Eventually I'd like to launch our product as a software system, but for now I operate as a design outsourcing service. I develope our algorithmic tools and also do the design work.
I'm currently a single person startup without enough revenue to hire a dev helper. But there are two kinds of developer I would hire: business automation experts and computational geometry experts.
And if I interviewed a compgeo person, guess what algorithms I'd ask about?
That's right, I'd ask them to derive the Bernstein basis functions, implement Decasteljau's algorithm using LERPs, prove this gives us the same result as numerically evaluating Bernstein, calculate the algorithmic speedup, and remark on the numerical stability.
This is either very easy - the person cares about reticulating splines! Or it's impossible, signalling lack of domain knowledge.
That's why in this case I don't feel it's a riddle at all. It's one of the basic mathematical pillars our entire product line is being built on. Knowing I don't have to mentor you in that is going to be a big deal for me. Likewise knowing that I do have to mentor you might not be a deal-breaker, but requires accommodations, like putting you in a more Junior role, specifying the algorithmic portion of tasks much more stringently, and taking responsibility for our numerical or mathematical analysis.
That second scenario might indeed happen if I make enough money to hire a Dev assistant, but can't afford one trained in comp geo. I in that case I would still pop the Bernstein/Decasteljau question but not expect them to go in depth. Instead I would ask them to pledge to learn, and provide paid training sessions, both to enrich them with useful domain knowledge, and to eventually benefit our team.