The Feynman principle applies - it is important to know the thing and not as important to know it's name. In an interview, find out if the person knows them thing or can work it out.
They don't even know the fundamentals
101–110 of 323 posts
Re: They don't even know the fundamentals
#102I will still never understand why I was asked to code an implementation of a binary tree for an interview once, something that is usually left to those who implement standard libraries or similar low-level needs, for a job that was basically writing user interfaces.
Because an implementation of a binary tree is dead simple.
Not to those who struggle with the notion of a pointer (or other such “fundamentals”), it’s not.
Re: They don't even know the fundamentals
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it should depend on how much money you are intending to pay the candidate and how desperate your company is to hire. By my experience, some companies need a competent body in the seat ASAP, and some are looking for world-class engineers.
But if they’re not competent, then you’ll be stuck debugging/rewriting 6 months of the the incompetent engineer’s work
Completely agree and have been burned this way as well. If you need engineers but cant even find competent ones (something ive seen before), then the only choice is to put them on prototype work/non-critical projects
Re: They don't even know the fundamentals
#104> There is another fundamental that is ignored by a lot of computer users. I think everyone who spends a lot of time behind a computer should learn how to touch type, since typing is still the main way of interacting with your computer. I sort of agree, but anyone typing out code at 120WPM isn't programming, they're writing. Programming is an intellectual activity, not a physical one so learning to touch type is wort…
Do someone really needs to learn touch typing? It comes naturally when you are using computer daily.
You don't, but boy do I love not focusing on how to type something and just having my thoughts flowing into the screen without me thinking how to do that.
Re: They don't even know the fundamentals
#105> There is another fundamental that is ignored by a lot of computer users. I think everyone who spends a lot of time behind a computer should learn how to touch type, since typing is still the main way of interacting with your computer. I sort of agree, but anyone typing out code at 120WPM isn't programming, they're writing. Programming is an intellectual activity, not a physical one so learning to touch type is wort…
You touch type not to break a world record. You touch type because you can write without thinking about the keyboard, just like you don't think when using or arms or legs, and it's faster to correct an error that you made. Imagine that you want to correct a block of code or a whole paragraph. If you don't touch type, maybe you will think twice before rewriting it.
I don't mind being slow early on when I'm doing something new, because I know that I will get muscle memory for things I repeat a lot and become faster. I also use an editor that supports mapping keys (currently vim).
Besides, only Java can make any programming task I/O bound ;p
Re: They don't even know the fundamentals
#106> There is another fundamental that is ignored by a lot of computer users. I think everyone who spends a lot of time behind a computer should learn how to touch type, since typing is still the main way of interacting with your computer. I sort of agree, but anyone typing out code at 120WPM isn't programming, they're writing. Programming is an intellectual activity, not a physical one so learning to touch type is wort…
There's also an argument here about having (and signalling) respect for one's peers, craft and tools. The keyboard is a tool. To me, it feels disrespectful for a person to expect these high wages when they don't even make the moderate effort involved in learning to use this tool efficiently. In my experience, this usually signals that a person isn't actually interested in continuously improving, feels overly entitled…
Would you say I am being disrespectful because when I learned to type at the age of 12 I wasn't following any official guide and learned to touch type with only ~6 fingers? I type at around 120 WPM on average. Is it just the speed, or do I have to conform to some specific definition of "touch typing?"
Re: They don't even know the fundamentals
#107> It turns out my day to day work doesn’t require deep knowledge about database internals and I can mostly treat them as a black box with an API 2. Because of such attitude of the previous dev team my client ended up with DB integrity ruined. Previous guys somehow didn't know they should use transactions when updating/deleting stuff in the DB, because hey, it's just API you call, who cares of mambo-jumbo happening be…
Thank you, ivanhoe! When I read that sentence, I gasped and thought the same thing. I've spent a career writing thousands of lines of application code that would have never been needed if the database had been designed properly. But it wasn't because the deployer didn't think they needed "deep knowledge" that day. We stand on the shoulders of giants who figured out the fundamentals just for us. The worse the violatio…
> I've spent a career writing thousands of lines of application code that would have never been needed if the database had been designed properly.
And then there's the time that I rewrote a small database application, but couldn't really reduce the byzantine schema, as that's just how our business works. However, I did reduce the main query from 727 lines to 93, and made it run twice as fast. And then, of course, the project was canceled because of politics, and the group still struggles with their terrible application, 3 years later.
I should really write a book about terrible management in Fortune 250's.
Re: They don't even know the fundamentals
#108> There is another fundamental that is ignored by a lot of computer users. I think everyone who spends a lot of time behind a computer should learn how to touch type, since typing is still the main way of interacting with your computer. I sort of agree, but anyone typing out code at 120WPM isn't programming, they're writing. Programming is an intellectual activity, not a physical one so learning to touch type is wort…
Does documentation factor into this? If I can touch-type at 120WPM, then I can churn out a great deal more documentation per unit time than another engineer that can only type at 40WPM. It's less burdensome for me to document well, to write expositional documents and to communicate regularly than my colleague that needs to budget their typing more carefully. While I might not be bottlenecked when working on a tricky…
Typing fast is useful but not necessarily enhancing productivity all that much. Even writing documentation is more about thinking than typing fast. Documentation must be concise and understandable.
Re: They don't even know the fundamentals
#109This is basically because interviewers need to properly advertise the level of depth they want in a role. It's unfair to ask for each engineer to be in the top 5% of engineers everywhere -- not every engineer can be -- but there are roles that don't require such depth.
But interviewing in general is tough (I'd go so far as to say it's a shitshow) and there's lies on both ends -- companies and managers and folks on the inside just want the best of the best -- and candidates just want a chance to get in the door -- the incentive to embellish is too high.
Re: They don't even know the fundamentals
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen this argument before and I don't think I agree. Surely there's a lot of times when I program that are heavy into thinking, but there's also a lot of mechanical work. Refactoring? Typing speed will help you. Going to try out a new approach? Typing speed will help you to see whether it's true or not. Everything else being equal, typing speed will help you try out stuff faster.
I'm a developer who is also a pretty fast typist, and I have to say that's not my experience. I wouldn't want to hunt and peck, but my sense is that higher than, like, 40 GWAM probably yields diminishing returns. Language might make a difference there. Writing C# with a QWERTY keyboard, you still have to interrupt a normal typing flow for your parentheses, braces, etc. I suppose it's helpful if you're writing long co…
I'd go a step further. In my experience writing C# I don't really need to type. Like I'll just sit on CTRL + Space and the arrow keys most of the time.
To be controversial, a language that rewards typing speed seems to me like a failure of tooling, why am I manipulating text like a caveman (ok.. ok.. Mesopotamian) rather than with the symbols that the language actually deals with.