171–180 of 332 posts
This post, along with the talk of interviewing and webapp development in this thread, is giving so much anxiety that it's really galvanizing my desire to leave this industry and never look back.
I used to program with 6 thick reference books around me. Has memorizing SDKs, APIs, libraries ever been a thing? Or is this just the daily "everything is bad nowadays" post?
Today on day one i would go: wtf is this Babel thing and how do i configure it so that Angular work together with SASS and is npm compatible with this version of Typescript? Which reactor pattern is flavor of the month and what stupid parameter was needed to make the router work? I hardly even know which files are shipped to the browser anymore after all Webpack preprocessing.
But once you actually have the setup in place, i have to admit the modern experience is a lot more productive and powerful. It's just that every time you have to start a new project or touch anything related to the build-process your soul dies inside. There are too much gunk just built on top and on top of each other, instead of replacing the whole stack, and thanks to leaky abstractions you have to understand at least something throughout every layer of the rotten cake.
There are a lot of scaffolding-scripts available, like Vue-cli, helping you to do all of this but imo they just add even more to the problem, now you got yet another layer of crap to crawl through and it prevents you from actually learning the real layer underneath.
I worked in field robotics and sometimes you would find yourself in a boat without internet fixing robotic software problems at sea. I took 50GB of wiki resources mirrored in my pocket.
I would not be surprised if even Professional Web Developers cant do it. Especially if you include deployment. This isn't the old days of FTP, Perl or PHP anymore. There are too much information I cant memorise every single bit of it. And I dont think you should either. Especially in the age of Google. My memory capacity has its limit, and there are things I just decide it is not important enough to memorise when I c…
I remain living happily in the old days of PHP, somehow making functioning applications and being paid well. Life is easy and good.
I would not be surprised if even Professional Web Developers cant do it. Especially if you include deployment. This isn't the old days of FTP, Perl or PHP anymore. There are too much information I cant memorise every single bit of it. And I dont think you should either. Especially in the age of Google. My memory capacity has its limit, and there are things I just decide it is not important enough to memorise when I c…
I don't see the value of memorizing somethings you just do once.
That said you're right, even the 99% of work still involves a lot of fiddling and sometimes research outside of writing code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My last interview: the interviewers said I was the only candidate who didn't Google any syntax or articles after being given a small 60 min development task from scratch. I was applying for a senior dev role and if I couldn't deliver a tiny web app, I wouldn't hire me either. I could have just solved the task procedurally but I asked if they wanted to see a more OO solution to demo a bit more knowledge. I think back…
It’s impressive what you say, but I would hire someone that would need to google to develop something if they were to code it quickly enough and to code it well.
I remember I used the X11 manuals, an encyclopedia sized serie. Plus the manual of every language I used. Plus the Unix man pages, especially section 2 for system calls.
Plus books about basic algorithms.
All those resources moved online and we use far more libraries now. I don't expect to be able to do anything without an internet connection.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is a strong argument that being good at that isn't required for most SWEs (including at FAANG) Algos/data structures are used as a proxy for problem solving and how fast someone can learn. Plus every decent CS program will have a few courses on it. Also, internal codebases are, well, internal. You won't get a nicely formatted Stack Overflow response on how X works if X is deep in the Google Source tree.
> Algos/data structures are used as a proxy for problem solving and how fast someone can learn. Problem solving, yes. How fast someone can learn, absolutely not. If you've never heard of dynamic programming there's absolutely no way you're going to come up with that in an hour. If you've never heard of binary trees you aren't going to think that one up in an interview. (Of course, you should already know basic data s…
Dynamic programming problems are really terrible for interview signal though.
Firstly, it's mostly an aha moment or two trying to realize the relationship between the elements. Not really lots of signal there.
Secondly, the code is trivial in 99% of cases. Just set up an initial (likely multidimensional) array, some for loops to iterate in the right order and then apply the formula. Returning the right array element at the end.
Also terrible signal, since the initial fizzbuzz question during phone screens or whatever should've caught an inability to code.
That said, yeah, the algorithms bit of interviews are the bits that are scary to me, since they're the biggest dice rolls. Everything else just has normal levels of unexpected events that you learn to deal with during your job. However, I write proper algorithms once or twice year and, even then, just trivial ones.