CEO Takes CS61A and Learns What “Orthogonal” Really Means

Joseph Parker, a second year at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, was inspired by many Twitter replies asking if he had “considered learning to code.” He enrolled in Berkeley’s well-known CS 61A, hoping to learn what Kubernetes is and find a technical co-founder.

“I asked myself, ‘What am I trying to optimize for right now?’ and that’s when I realized the marginal cost of taking another class is so low, while the ROI can be quite high.”

CS 61A is one of Berkeley’s most popular courses, with enrollment nearing 2,000 students this year. It is one of the introductory coding courses required for a computer science major at the school, and Parker plans on taking more computer science courses in the future.

“CS 61A is necessary but not sufficient for my computer science education. Conditioned on the probability of me finishing this class, the expected value of my completing the degree is O(n), which I calculated using Dijkstra’s algorithm.” he says. “With a high enough variance, I will be as well-known as John Denero.”

He states that his biggest stressor at the moment is his problem set that attempts to solve the Towers of Hanoi problem. While frustrated with the concept of recursion, he believes he can derive many insights in running a startup from the technical details.

“Recursion is a great parallel to running any business. Just as you need to take the recursive ‘leap of faith’, we, founders, must take a ‘leap of faith’ in any of our ideas.” When asked about what the recursive base case entails in running a business, he replied, “The orthogonal to running a business is leveraging object-oriented programming paradigms.”

Parker has accepted a software engineering internship at Google this summer, for which he interviewed at the Grace Hopper Conference last fall. While the conference is intended for women in computing to gather and discuss research and career interests, Parker claims he was awarded a scholarship to the conference under the gender-neutral name, “Jo.” When asked if he would be taking a spot away from a woman at the conference, he replied that his attendance is not a problem because he organizes events for women in computer science. “So in a way, I kind of deserve this spot.”

Parker is excited for what the rest of the semester brings. “I’m at a local maximum in my life,” he adds. “If I gradient descent, then I’ll be able to reach the global maximum.” Parker says. “I must BTS, which is different from DFS.”

Co-authored with Tina Zheng