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Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

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Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#281

Post by Tmp1234 »

whack wrote: post #101

> I experience PTSD like symptoms from the constant barrage of negative thoughts the difficulty and stress of doing these problems are causing me. A lot of the other posters have given some great advice from a technical perspective. I'd suggest taking some time to evaluate and improve your mental health as well. If you're putting yourself under so much pressure, that pressure alone will hold you back to a great exten…

I added a separate comment to add some information about my situation. It addresses your question and advice too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594084

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#282

Post by Tmp1234 »

flocial wrote: post #44

"Easy problems take me 2-5 hours." Are you sure you're not reinventing established theories and algorithms? Those problems are supposed to be hard because they're based on ideas discovered by the most brilliant minds. If you can do them in 2-5 hours with no background you might actually be real good. Depending on what level of familiarity you have with the material, you might be selling yourself really short. Deliber…

I agree that some of the problems are too hard to be realistic. I made sure to not count those when I was analyzing my performance. As I said in the comment I'm linking to below, a few months ago I couldn't even do Fibonacci recursively. I just couldn't figure out how to structure the code, when to call the function, how to pass the results of each call up the stack etc. This is just one example. The other day I tried to do the brute force implementation of finding the median of 2 sorted arrays. Brute force as in have two pointers at the start of each array incrementing until you reach the median. It was too hard for me to code successfully and I spent 2-3 hours on it.

I wrote a comment that I realize should have been part of the original post on hindsight. It may give you more content if you choose to respond.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594084

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#283

Post by Tmp1234 »

itamarst wrote: post #6

Lots of companies don't do stupid programming puzzles. Here's a list: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards Don't listen to people telling you that you shouldn't be a programmer. Doing these sort of puzzles has very little to do with 90% of what programmers do. There are jobs that need these algorithm skills, sure, but they're not the default jobs.

Thank you for this resource!

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#284

Post by ct520 »

fein wrote: post #50
ct520 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PMP cert seems to be a defacto certificate I see thrown around in the field. (besides all the scrum stuff)

At the time of this reply you've been downvoted a bit, and that is ridiculous. No, not everyone requires certification to be a PM, but many places do, and in many cases it helps get past the resume filtering process. So get a PMP cert if you want, or don't and find a company that isn't going to discriminate on the lack of a certification. It costs a bit of sanity and $500 some to pad PMI's coffers, but its basically…

Gotcha and agreed. My lexicon seems to be regressing rapidly with age :(

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#285

Post by Tmp1234 »

oliwarner wrote: post #160

I am continually surprised by HN and its reluctance to call out mental health issues. It is not normal to feel like your world is ending when you're under pressure. Forget the rest of this stuff. You don't need more tests. Talk to a councillor with the aim they can fix or refer you onto CBT, or a psychiatrist to mediate. There is no shame in this. Not dealing with it is only going to cause unnecessary suffering. Addr…

You're not wrong that there's a mental health issue at hand. There's also a lot riding on my ability to do these leetcode questions. I've been talking to councilors for the past decade, but I'm at a point where I need to be financially independent. I wrote more about it in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594084

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#286

Post by petecodes »

I would honestly go easy on yourself and talk to a counsellor so you can relax. Tonnes of people do degrees in one thing and then do something totally different..all you need to say is you got a CS degree but you want to do something different now.

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#287

Post by throwaway114433 »

Man, don't despair!

Seriously. I think that you are just doing the wrong interviews. Applying for the next wanna-be-like Google company that asks for stupid riddles (yes, they are damn stupid - and I hate them, because they are totally unrealistic, disconnected from reality, and with a lot of pre-assumptions that in reality never happen) and "how to find the n-th element in a non-sorted set considering that there is a rat jumping up and down every 30 seconds and this has an impact on how the numbers are stored, ... in time O(logN) with space O(1) etc" doesn't say about you or your abilities.

Nothing. At. All!

It only says that you didn't prepare well for that sort of exercises. Can you do better? Maybe, if you [still] find the fun in it, which you don't and it seems you never did. So ditch it! That's not what you wanna do now! You know what you can do? Apply for a job. They ask you to do the codility test? Just ditch them. Don't take s* from anyone that doesn't value you as a human being. A machine can't assess how good you are. Yet. Maybe in 50 years. Not today.

Right now you need to regain trust in yourself, and in order to do so, you might wanna try to start with a company that doesn't ask you to do these shy tests. I saw that some comments here mentioned a github link with some companies not following such madness. Take a look at them. And remember the rule: DON'T even think about starting the online test if all they ask is a riddle. If they are CS questions, why not. If it's a riddle, stop it right away and maybe even tell the company that you won't do it and why - they might want your feedback. Again, this is entirely up to you.

I want you to repeat it in your mind until nausea: these tests don't say anything about yourself! They only say how bad the company is, as they don't value anything else but your ability to solve riddles that they find "smart". So, the question is: do you want to interview with someone that sees the real s that you can do and that you can offer, or someone that likes to assess how good you are with their interviewing process?

Remember: interviewing is broken. Nobody has yet found a way to assess how really good someone is.

Everyone will tell you "oh but you need to know the basics of CS". All it takes is to learn algorithms and data structures then? That's it? Studying a couple of books? That's all CS is about? And that's all an software engineering job is about? I didn't know that. All I know is that it's inconsistent with the large amount of exams I had to take to get my CS degree. Not 1, not 2. Many!

And the funny thing? They even ask "behavioral" questions, thinking they can spot liars or "culturally unfit people", if you are lucky enough to pass the stupid online riddles. You know how easy it is to fake answers to show that you are such a great team player? Or that you are an ambitious person? Unless you have a psychologist with two big balls during the interviews, and even then, you might find the psychopath that knows how to fake answers. That most of the times become managers. Top level ones.

Seriously - don't feel bad. You achieved a lot, you got your damn degree. Don't let these poor people ruin your life - yes, for me they are poor people, and no, I am not sorry. They just don't know how to interview, but as they are big names, or follow the methods dictated by the big names, they feel they are doing the right thing.

Google admitted many times that their interviewing methods are doomed. It's nice to find that type of guy. It's to create a niche of people that feel intelligent, that need to feel smart, that need to have something in common. It creates equality inside the company, because everyone had to go through the same sh, so nobody questions "how come that this guy got hired?". It's a pool of prepackaged types. I hope you don't wanna be one of them, do you?

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#288

Post by Tmp1234 »

generallyfalse wrote: post #197

I should like to see some of the problems that take you 2-5 hours to solve. Show your solution, and text about the way you tackle the problem. Perhaps you need a mentor, someone that can give you some tips about your coding abilities and what you should do to improve. If you need more than 10 minutes to sum the cubes of numbers from 1 to n in python, then I think you have a problem as a programmer. Can you point to a…

For the median question, I did not allow myself to combine the array. My idea was to increment in each array based on which value would come next in a sequence (as if they were on array), stop when I've incremented n times where n = length of both arrays / 2 (the median position) and then return. Here's the code:

class Solution: def findMedianSortedArrays(self, nums1, nums2): """ :type nums1: List[int] :type nums2: List[int] :rtype: float """

        length = len(nums1) + len(nums2)
        medianIndex = length // 2
        ptr1 = 0
        ptr2 = 0
        curr = 0
        flag = 0
        
        if nums1[ptr1]
Here's what I wrote for your sum the cubes. Took me 1 minute. I hope I didn't misunderstand the question.

def sumCubes(n): sumC = 0 for i in range(n+1): sumC += i 3 return sumC

I'll give you 2 more leetcode examples. Neither passed all test cases. The first is 2-3 hours. The latter 3. I didn't post the last submission for the latter one because I believe the one I posted is more telling of my thought process and coding ability imo so that solution is between 1 and 2 hours of work, but I wasn't able to get it in the end.

I honestly don't recall my idea here. I think it was to see if the start and end of the array had the same letter and if it didn't cut off the first and last letter and continue analyzing the array until the center is reached.

https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-palindromic-substring/...

class Solution: def longestPalindrome(self, s): """ :type s: str :rtype: str """ curr = "" big = ""

        for c in s:
            curr += c
            if curr != curr[::-1]:
                if len(curr[:len(curr)-1]) >= len(big):
                    big = curr[:len(curr)-1]
                    print(big)
                while curr != curr[::-1]:
                    curr = curr[1:]
        
        if len(curr) > len(big):
            return curr
        else:
            return big
I thought there were 3 cases in this problem. You hit a character, you hit a ? or you hit . The first one meant an exact match had to be made. The second that there only had to be some character in the string to take a position (the string couldn't end if there was a ?). The last could mean 0 to n matches so there had to be a lot of checks in my mind. I also thought about what happens if there's "?" which I wrote as a case inside the "" if case. When test cases didn't work I would try and code for that test case and it kept going wrong so I eventually gave up and looked at the solution. My main flaw is that it didn't occur to me that backtracking was the way to go or a way to check all the potential combinations. I thought you just had to keep moving forward.

https://leetcode.com/problems/wildcard-matching/description/

class Solution: def isMatch(self, s, p): """ :type s: str :type p: str :rtype: bool """ if len(p) == 0 and len(s) == 0: return True if len(p) == 0: return False

        i = 0
        j = 0
        while i = len(p) and p[len(p) - 1] != '*':
                return False
            
            if p[j] == '*':
                while j  x:
                        i+=1
                    while j  len(s) or j >= len(p) and i

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#289

Post by Tmp1234 »

csnewb wrote: post #4

It's been 3 years since I graduated and started working as a full-time software engineer, but I still struggle with leetcode problems. Even easy ones. My day to day work involves gluing together API's and not writing algorithmic code to solve tricky puzzles. Don't think that just because you can't solve leetcode problems you're not meant to be an engineer. And trust me, I feel your pain. I haven't written a binary se…

My view has been they are looking for people with high IQs exclusively. Whiteboard interviews cut out people who are not even intelligent enough to memorize solutions and algorithms while also accepting people smart enough to come up with solutions to tough problems they haven't seen before. It seems given how much I struggle I may not even fit in the memorize 300+ leetcode category.

I'm very interested in this divide between people who are for white board interviews and against it and how it correlates with job performance and content. I may make a separate post about it because I'd like to get to the bottom of it.

Re: Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

#290

Post by Tmp1234 »

abledon wrote: post #103
mikeomoto wrote: post #55

You don't have a job yet, so you don't actually know what being a programmer is like. You're stressing out about what you think being a programmer is like, and worse, you're stressing out about what you think how a programmer is hired . Sit back, relax, go talk to someone who actually does the job, and re-evaluate once you're better contextualized.

Yeah like I said in another thread, CTCI is for more of a software __engineering__ role. There are lots of really easy software developement jobs where you ain’t doing algorithmic/dataatructures, just chilling with other code monkeys , humming Katy perry tunes and stackoverflow searching 4 hrs a day, the rest is breaks and hn reading

This doesn't sound half bad. How can I find these?
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