141–150 of 323 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right but you or more precisely that interviewer is also wrong. Understanding the way your storage works is crucial, yes. But you ensure people understand it not by asking "Explain ACID to me" but by asking to design a certain system and observing them figuring out requirements and asking questions. You then ask follow up question about consistency and reliability, you probably even can ask about benefits of u…
> I totally fail to parse any written explanation of liskov substitution principle Off the top of my head, "all child classes should be usable interchangeably when dealing with an interface/base class". I guess that's too imprecise to qualify as "written explanation"?
> 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…
You're right but you or more precisely that interviewer is also wrong. Understanding the way your storage works is crucial, yes. But you ensure people understand it not by asking "Explain ACID to me" but by asking to design a certain system and observing them figuring out requirements and asking questions. You then ask follow up question about consistency and reliability, you probably even can ask about benefits of u…
Who has time for that? Interviewers design interview for themselves, not for the interviewees. It's basically a trivia game at this point of time. A prime example of "Everything is obvious once you know the answer" syndrome.
> 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…
The author says, "I wouldn’t be able to explain from the top of my head what the ACID term means" . I think there is a big difference between not knowing something off the top of your head and being completely unaware of it. If you have awareness of something, you can make decisions based on that awareness without necessarily having a deep understanding. When you have no awareness is when the big issues arise. For ex…
The next level is being aware that the “I” doesn't quite apply in most databases with their default transaction settings, true isolation/serialisability being sacrificed for performance, though the distinction rarely matters is can be significant.
> You don't necessarily have to understand how a B-tree works for an index to be effective.
How a b-tree operates can be safely kept as a black-box thing, the important level of detail that many miss in my experience is how compound indexes can (and more importantly, can't) be used. Others include that in most databases defining a foreign key relationship does not create a supporting index by default, and that careless use of functions in joining & filtering clauses often blocks index use. If you have a DB specialist on the team there is probably no need for other devs to be intimately aware of even these details, but they should at least be aware enough of their existence than they know to ask the local expert (or look things up elsewhere) to check their working when the issues might affect what they are working on.
As a bit of a local DB specialist who has met some bad ones, I should point out that it is important that we, and other local “exports”, be approachable so the other devs feel they can run things by us for verification/improvement.
> “Yes, every programmer should know how their hardware works as one cannot write an efficient software without that knowledge 4, and I wouldn’t be able to do my job if I didn’t know anything about computer internals, yak, yak, yak…” I agree that you don't need to know anything about von Neumann Architecture and the likes in order to be a Web Dev. But I wouldn't want to hire someone who doesn't have basic knowledge a…
I think the main thing we want to avoid here is situations like the following: - interviewer asks candidate to determine the complexity of some algorithms - candidate is nervous, has a minor brain-fart and flubs a couple of them - interviewer evaluates candidate as lacking basic CS knowledge you learn in 1st year of any CS course Ok in this case we're talking about big-O, but it could really be anything.
> 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…
The author says, "I wouldn’t be able to explain from the top of my head what the ACID term means" . I think there is a big difference between not knowing something off the top of your head and being completely unaware of it. If you have awareness of something, you can make decisions based on that awareness without necessarily having a deep understanding. When you have no awareness is when the big issues arise. For ex…
People only need to know about ACID if they are arguing about whether to use a database that doesn't implement it, or switching between databases some of which do and some of which don't provide strong ACID guarantees.
> 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…
Knowing fundamentals is important. It is simply part of the professional culture, or part of what they sometimes call a degree of professional “maturity.” A programmer who is not aware of the fundamentals will always find a way to write bad code.
Don’t ask questions that can be answered with a web search.
But for God's sake please Google before asking any general question. Some questions are literally within the first 5 results of the first page.
Maybe I shouldn't blame them though, sometimes I did that too :/