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Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

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Re: Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

#141

Post by int_19h »

diminoten wrote: post #89
radlad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a self-taught programmer who doesn't have a CS degree, my experience has been that this is not a significant hurdle to any workplace that I would seriously consider applying.

As a self-taught programmer who doesn't have a CS degree, my experience is substantially different. There are many places where I would seriously consider applying (FAANG) that this would be a significant hurdle. I've taken to competitive programming as a way to prepare myself, but I'm a long way away from being at a level where I'm comfortable applying to the companies I'd like to work for. I think a lot of people l…

I am self-taught, no degree whatsoever. I didn't have a problem landing a job at Microsoft regardless, with a few years of mostly C++ experience under my belt. Wouldn't even say it was hard. And no-one at work had asked me if I have a degree, ever since that first interview.

Now, that's not FAANG, technically speaking (although FAANG was always about stocks, not job culture). But for what it's worth, I've had recruiters from Google, Facebook and Amazon try to lure me over. None of them indicated that my lack of degree is an issue for them.

Maybe that's team-specific, I don't know. But it's certainly not true that they'd never hire someone without a degree.

Re: Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

#142

Post by int_19h »

samlord wrote: post #129
sfuller wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person without the degree that works at one of these companies, I can honestly say that it's incredibly difficult to get in. What I haven't seen anyone talk about is how it haunts you constantly. Not necessarily coming from other people, but knowing that if someone wanted to call you incompetent, it'd be on you to prove otherwise since you dont have the degree to back up your knowledge. I wish I could go back an…

Exactly, you took the words right out of my mouth. I'm 6 years in as a web dev and still feel the downsides of not having that paper. There is that constant, need to prove feeling that lingers in my mind. I'd love to work for a big company but I am stuck in my country. Visa approval requires that paper to prove you're skilled. Stuck with opportunities that pay really less, compared to Europe/USA. Don't know about you…

> Visa approval requires that paper to prove you're skilled.

There are ways to go around that - in some countries, US among them, you can count some years of specialized work experience in the field in lieu of formal education ("degree equivalence" - I believe). I got a work visa in Canada on that basis, and later L1, H1B, and finally a green card in US, without any degree.

With respect to US specifically, google for "USCIS three-for-one" for more on this.

Re: Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

#143

Post by cyphar »

int_19h wrote: post #141
diminoten wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a self-taught programmer who doesn't have a CS degree, my experience is substantially different. There are many places where I would seriously consider applying (FAANG) that this would be a significant hurdle. I've taken to competitive programming as a way to prepare myself, but I'm a long way away from being at a level where I'm comfortable applying to the companies I'd like to work for. I think a lot of people l…

I am self-taught, no degree whatsoever. I didn't have a problem landing a job at Microsoft regardless, with a few years of mostly C++ experience under my belt. Wouldn't even say it was hard. And no-one at work had asked me if I have a degree, ever since that first interview. Now, that's not FAANG, technically speaking (although FAANG was always about stocks, not job culture). But for what it's worth, I've had recruit…

I think people are over-emphasising the importance of a degree when it comes to CS (obviously some workplaces filter by "do you have a degree" but I wouldn't want to work in such a place -- clearly they don't care about you as an engineer).

Sorry to be a bit old-fashioned, but a degree isn't the most important part of going to university -- it's the education you get. I would argue that it is very difficult for someone to learn about data structures and algorithmic complexity (+ algorithm design) without taking a university course or doing some pretty intense self-study. It's not something you can pick up on the job. And this is knowledge that I think more folks in our industry should have.

So you might be doing totally fine without a degree, and that's great, but I imagine that you also have some CS knowledge that OP doesn't have -- and maybe you picked it up from somewhere or did some study on your own to gain it. If I was a hiring manager I wouldn't filter on degree, I would filter on some sort of working knowledge of CS (and, for reference, inverting binary trees on a whiteboard is not an example of "working knowledge").

Re: Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

#144

Post by topkai22 »

peterwwillis wrote: post #46
topkai22 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This remains a serious problem on my team- Over half my team members don’t have CS degrees. They get an enormous amount done, but there is often a perf or maintainability cost. I have no intention of swapping them out because they ultimately provide enormous value, but it’s noticeable.

Is it the algorithmic efficiency that's the problem, or the ability to scale the application? I've seen things some people wouldn't believe. mod_perl 1.4 on Apache 2.0 handling 350,000 hps dynamic traffic on twenty archaic 1U's. Five tiers of caching, serialized objects on local disks, NFS in production. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. Who cares about inefficiency if it scales?

It’s algorithmic efficiency and at a basic level- things like 9 levels of nested loops, each loop pass generating an http call (admitadly some of this is the platform we are using fault)

Re: Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

#145

Post by d--b »

CS is to professional programming what fluid dynamics are to car mechanics. You can be a great car mechanics and never know about the fluid dynamics equation at all. You do need some basic knowledge (pressure, temperature, etc), but then it’s a different discipline altogether...

Re: Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

#146

Post by yc12340 »

el_benhameen wrote: post #75
radlad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a self-taught programmer who doesn't have a CS degree, my experience has been that this is not a significant hurdle to any workplace that I would seriously consider applying.

Where do you find jobs to apply to? I am also a self-taught programmer without a CS degree, and it seems that a surprisingly large portion of companies use obtuse algo/whiteboarding interview questions. My objection is less that I don’t know or can’t learn them and more that it seems like a waste of time to prep for stuff that isn’t useful.

Those companies aren't hiring, they are just sifting market for rock starts. I have seen this in numerous places already — when a company has enough product leaders, but still enough money/time to hire a couple more, they begin whiteboarding people. Several years later those product owners will leave, and suddenly the interviews are reduced to "you worked with ? Know what is? Accepte^W erm, I mean we will contact you tomorrow!"

Several weeks after passing the interview you start asking colleagues about their own interviews. And everyone has wastly different experience. Some were hired after being harrassed for hours. Others got job thanks to friendly tip...

Re: Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

#147

Post by onion2k »

cs0 wrote: post #50
hmmk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly did you have trouble with? These really are simple problems, all you need are an understanding of loops, ASCII character codes, and basic arithmetic. To be honest, I'm surprised a seasoned developer of 5+ years can't do these, or at least have a decent stab at them.

I just replied above, but I've never been amazing at being able to figure out how I should be using for loops to solve problems quickly and efficiently. I do tend to make things harder for myself, as my boss and fianceè have told me before. I usually end up with a very convoluted solution which I end up coming back to and refactoring the next day.

There's an old Kent Beck quote that fits here... "Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast." Your approach fits that.

http://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast

Re: Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

#148

Post by agentultra »

I think I may have felt this once or twice in my career.

I'm 15 years in now. I study type theory and use formal mathematics to model software systems. I don't have any degrees. In my day job I lead teams writing mostly Javascript to build web services and APIs for moving data around. I teach a small group Haskell once a week at lunch. I speak at conferences big and small. I still wonder at times if I know what I'm doing or whether I deserve to have opinions about anything or blah blah blah.

It doesn't help having voices around you all the time that call your skills, experience, and knowledge into question. You have provided value to someone if you're still a practicing software developer. You know how to work in a team, solve problems, and have developed a sense of taste for what problems are worth solving. You understand the tools you use and have an intuition for their strengths and weaknesses. Maybe you even have some experience getting other developers to work together on a large project. That's useful stuff. You are a useful person.

Does learning theory help? I think so. Once I stuck with type theory I started to see structure and abstractions in code I couldn't before. Learning how to formalize programs has allowed me to think about the correctness of complex systems in precise ways in order to discover "bugs" in my designs. These have also helped me find more ways to write simple, reliable code.

Re: Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

#149

Post by triangleman »

cs0 wrote: post #31

Thank you to everyone who has replied to my rant. I felt of low value for not being able to provide immediate help for most of the problems that she's being taught to work on. Some of the examples (since some of you were asking for them): https://github.com/cs50/docs/blob/master/_pages/2018/x/psets... https://github.com/cs50/docs/blob/master/_pages/2018/x/psets... I realise that I may have written my original post a…

These problems remind me of the ones on checkio.org. The difference being over there you get the benefit of using python--not that I already knew python but it's rather intuitive, plus you can run a million things through an interpreter to quickly understand how it works. These CS50 problems require C, which most mortals would have a much harder time working with.

In either case you constantly consult the language reference and standard libraries until you find something that works. The C reference at https://reference.cs50.net/ looks perfectly good.

To be honest I don't know how I would load a CC# into an array to compute Luhn's algorithm on it in C. In Python I know there are easy ways of doing that, because strings are automatically arrays in the first place (same as that Caesar cypher problem, Python makes it much easier to work with strings). I don't even know if that's the "right" way to do it, but that's what I would do in Python: Convert the number to a string, operate on it as an array, converting each character to an int as it goes, running the algorithm as given in the problem, back-converting to string and then back again to int as needed (like if I need to add the digits of a number together). Fine I suppose I could avoid doing that by taking modulos and if I didn't know what a modulo was I would divide by 10 for instance and then take a floor to get the first digit of a 2-digit number.

I have no idea if any of these methods are "correct", I would just hammer away at the code until the acceptance tests passed. It would take over an hour for each of these solutions, after getting into the zone, so let's say 2 hours. There you go, 4 hours of work to get through these two problems in C, let's add on a lunch break and we have a full work day. That will be $325 thank you. Oh I don't get paid to study computer science in my free time? Oh ok. I guess I will just bookmark CS50 and come back to it... some day.

Your wife is lucky she gets to study this stuff. Don't be so hard on yourself.

Re: Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

#150

Post by int_19h »

cyphar wrote: post #143
int_19h wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am self-taught, no degree whatsoever. I didn't have a problem landing a job at Microsoft regardless, with a few years of mostly C++ experience under my belt. Wouldn't even say it was hard. And no-one at work had asked me if I have a degree, ever since that first interview. Now, that's not FAANG, technically speaking (although FAANG was always about stocks, not job culture). But for what it's worth, I've had recruit…

I think people are over-emphasising the importance of a degree when it comes to CS (obviously some workplaces filter by "do you have a degree" but I wouldn't want to work in such a place -- clearly they don't care about you as an engineer). Sorry to be a bit old-fashioned, but a degree isn't the most important part of going to university -- it's the education you get. I would argue that it is very difficult for someo…

Oh, absolutely. When I say "self-learned", that includes bits and pieces of CS. E.g. I wrote a BASIC-to-C++ transpiler back when I was 14; and to do that, I had to learn things like recursive-descent parsing, for example, or how hashtables work (because I wanted my dialect of BASIC to have them) etc. None of it was from CS courses or books - just looking stuff up on the Internet as needed, often reading others' code. This kind of learning from experience is not a well-organized process, and the results were often a lot messier than they really needed to be - and would likely be with more formal education like SICP! - but it works.
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