91–100 of 157 posts
Reminds me of a comic I saw: Interviewer: How do you swap two variables without using a temporary variable? Candidate: x = x + y; y = x - y; x = x - y! Interviewer: You're hired! ... two months later ... Boss: What the hell is this code you wrote? Programmer: I swapped two variables without using a temporary variable! Boss: You're fired!
Reminds me of a comic I saw: Interviewer: How do you swap two variables without using a temporary variable? Candidate: x = x + y; y = x - y; x = x - y! Interviewer: You're hired! ... two months later ... Boss: What the hell is this code you wrote? Programmer: I swapped two variables without using a temporary variable! Boss: You're fired!
I've been looking around at jobs, and was advised to start practising on HackerRank for the technical interviews.
I've been coding professionally for 30-ish years. There is very little that I've seen on HackerRank that comes anywhere close to a "real" software problem that I've faced developing actual software.
Why is this being used to do technical interviews? What's the thinking here?
Reminds me of a comic I saw: Interviewer: How do you swap two variables without using a temporary variable? Candidate: x = x + y; y = x - y; x = x - y! Interviewer: You're hired! ... two months later ... Boss: What the hell is this code you wrote? Programmer: I swapped two variables without using a temporary variable! Boss: You're fired!
This is so true. I've been looking around at jobs, and was advised to start practising on HackerRank for the technical interviews. I've been coding professionally for 30-ish years. There is very little that I've seen on HackerRank that comes anywhere close to a "real" software problem that I've faced developing actual software. Why is this being used to do technical interviews? What's the thinking here?
It never made sense to me, I always just do a technical conversation and if for some reason a muggle has gotten an offer it's easy to detect and deal with. People don't last long in coding jobs if they can't do it anyway.
> Assuming for a minute that students from lesser tier colleges are less smart (possibly untrue but again a discussion for another day) Let’s discuss it now: they are NOT ‘less smart.’
Yeah, this. My home state's college's CS program boasted it was one of the best in the northwest. My friends that went through it constantly had to ask me to explain simple stuff to them because the professor's assignments were wrong or confusing. Compare that to our local community college, which seemed to have a much more well-rounded course and taught the fundamentals in a way that made much more sense. Anecdotal…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Almost everything you will ever need is already implemented in a library for you to reuse, and even reaching for that library is pretty rare. This undercuts your claim a bit as someone has to be able to write the library in the first place. Yes it’s rare, but the software engineering industry is big enough that “rare” can be a “this happens all the time in domain X”. Overall though I’d agree that it’s not useful fo…
Writing foundational algorithms/data-structures libraries (e.g. language-runtime stdlibs like libc) is usually treated as a sort of sacred ritual in programming—something where it’s “obvious” that it should be done slowly, carefully, and without distraction, with each change audited carefully by many peers before accepting a merge. It’s not often that you’re writing such code “in anger”, under time-pressure to ship t…
I'll be honest, I think you're vastly overestimating how well these things are actually developed :) I agree with what you said, I just found this part a little bit funny.
> Assuming for a minute that students from lesser tier colleges are less smart (possibly untrue but again a discussion for another day) Let’s discuss it now: they are NOT ‘less smart.’
Any one student may happen to be a genius at a lower tier school, but comparing population averages, it's pretty clear that smarter pupils go to MIT or Harvard than less prestigious universities and I don't see why this would be controversial. Some people are smarter than others. It doesn't make them more valuable as human beings, but there are real differences in the world.
This is true, but most of them don't go to top tier schools. Which is not at all the same thing as saying most people who go to top tier schools aren't smarter than average. This fact is the root of a lot confusion in the area.
Reminds me of a comic I saw: Interviewer: How do you swap two variables without using a temporary variable? Candidate: x = x + y; y = x - y; x = x - y! Interviewer: You're hired! ... two months later ... Boss: What the hell is this code you wrote? Programmer: I swapped two variables without using a temporary variable! Boss: You're fired!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, the apparent point of competitive programming--building up a good repertoire of advanced algorithms and data structures--is pretty close to useless. That's not the point of competitive programming. If you talk to anybody who is good at competitive programming, they will tell you it's _not_ about memorizing algorithms and datastructures. It's about developing algorithmic problem solving skills; skills that…
I have seen successful competitors people do basically that. And I have seen them train how to write basic algorithms super fast again and again. Yes, they had also algorithmic problem solving skills. But they learned huge amount of algorithms and datastructures so that they don't have to derive them each time. And they spend time literally training how to write them fast without mistake. It was not just about proble…
Time to start asking more about security and OOP on interviews OOP is kind of topic that everybody is expected to know, yet for some reasons there are huge gaps between people when it comes to proficency at it, at modeling systems and domains correctly.