I Am a Bad Developer • Hacker News Board

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#61

Post by boyter » Tue, May 07, 2013, 1:18 AM UTC

gizmo686 wrote: post #34

boyter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if that's really relevant. Unless you are applying for a job where time is money stock trading or some such I don't see how knowing a method you are writing is O(log N) rather then O(N2) is useful. Its something to keep in mind sure, but I would rather have the slower method integrated into the code base faster. Yes performance is a feature but realistically you can get away with some fairly awfully performi…

Knowing the time complexity a given function you write is generally not important. However, the skill to analyze the complexity is an important one to have, because when performance issues to come up, it is often a very powerful tool to have.

Agreed. However it would probably be better to show someone some code with a loop in a loop and ask them why it could potentially be a problem.

If they can tell you in Big O notation why its bad for large inputs then great, but so long as they can tell you why that's what really matters.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#62

Post by boyter » Tue, May 07, 2013, 1:20 AM UTC

iguana wrote: post #49

boyter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if that's really relevant. Unless you are applying for a job where time is money stock trading or some such I don't see how knowing a method you are writing is O(log N) rather then O(N2) is useful. Its something to keep in mind sure, but I would rather have the slower method integrated into the code base faster. Yes performance is a feature but realistically you can get away with some fairly awfully performi…

Although understanding the difference is important, the specifics are typically far more relevant in a high performance language than a dynamic scripting language with lots of "magic". OP is interviewing for a C++ gig, so performance was clearly a motivating factor. Not nearly as relevant for someone using scripting languages and building UIs.

For a C++ I agree hence I mentioned it being important for certain cases, but for something like your standard CRUD app its probably not worth thinking about.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#63

Post by nilkn » Tue, May 07, 2013, 1:23 AM UTC

Justsignedup wrote: post #56

rthomas6 wrote: post #15

Isn't the author just experiencing imposter syndrome? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome Despite all his colleagues, friends, and coworkers telling him he is proficient, keeping current in the industry, coding for fun, contributing to open source, proactively bettering his coding style and knowledge, and knowing a lot of theory, his mediocre interviews are enough to convince him that he's a bad developer.…

Granted 10 is a bit much. But it depends on who to interview with. If you are good, there are consulting companies like ThoughtBot or PivotalLabs who hire good developers pretty easily. And their interview process is all about checking if you are good and get along with people rather than just if you know how to traverse obscure data structures. Imposter syndrome does sound quite right. Or the guy is just depressed p…

I think it's a combination of both. He sounds ashamed to be a software developer to the extent that he doesn't want his daughter to know. What's up with that? It might not be the same as being a heart surgeon, but at least in the US software engineering is viewed very positively as a career, probably alongside chemical engineering and law (actually law is viewed fairly negatively by many these days).

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#64

Post by 10098 » Tue, May 07, 2013, 1:25 AM UTC

bfung wrote: post #42

No sympathy here. "I am a bad developer"... so? At least you have recognition of a problem, now time to improve. Why the rejetions? Has any company told you what exactly were the reasons for rejection? Ask for a reply from the interviewers and the specific questions. Don't get those questions wrong again. I contribute to a plethora of open source projects in a range of languages such as C++, Perl, Python, and even va…

Yes, I found it a bit odd too that the OP claims interest in math yet seems to have problems understanding computational complexity. Although, mathematics is a very broad subject, maybe his focus was on something else.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#65

Post by stouset » Tue, May 07, 2013, 1:28 AM UTC

pbiggar wrote: post #36

barce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, I've been the victim of "couldn't balance a B-Tree fast enough so you're not hired but you'll never see a B-Tree at work." You mention that there isn't a better solution. IMHO, I disagree. I think Github has figured out a way. They've been around 5 years and haven't fired anybody and nobody has quit. Most firings are due to a job / job skill mismatch. At Github, they do a week long paid interview so both sides re…

What make you think GitHub haven't fired anybody? I don't know that they have, but it seems very unlikely.

In fact, they have fired a few people.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#66

Post by Draiken » Tue, May 07, 2013, 1:31 AM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #63

Justsignedup wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Granted 10 is a bit much. But it depends on who to interview with. If you are good, there are consulting companies like ThoughtBot or PivotalLabs who hire good developers pretty easily. And their interview process is all about checking if you are good and get along with people rather than just if you know how to traverse obscure data structures. Imposter syndrome does sound quite right. Or the guy is just depressed p…

I think it's a combination of both. He sounds ashamed to be a software developer to the extent that he doesn't want his daughter to know. What's up with that? It might not be the same as being a heart surgeon, but at least in the US software engineering is viewed very positively as a career, probably alongside chemical engineering and law (actually law is viewed fairly negatively by many these days).

Ever heard of a heart surgeon that can't pay his bills?

Now have you heard of a developer that couldn't pay his bills?

That's why he wouldn't want his daughter to know what he does.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#67

Post by tootie » Tue, May 07, 2013, 1:35 AM UTC

dpiers wrote: post #22

On Friday I had a remote interview where I was asked to search for the value closest to X in a sorted 2D array (columns and rows are both sorted in increasing order). I came up with a trivial solution to find a specific value, but got tripped up modifying it to find an unknown value that could be higher or lower than the target. I have not heard back from the company. On Saturday/Sunday, I went to AngelHack SF and di…

Confirmed. I give interviews and people get offers or not based on my feedback. I also don't know what I'm doing. It could be Imposter's Syndrome or maybe that's just what imposters tell themselves.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#68

Post by boyter » Tue, May 07, 2013, 1:36 AM UTC

typicalrunt wrote: post #51

I could have written this piece. It hit that close to home. I'm 15 years into my IT career and I can honestly say it's not getting easier. I don't believe it's an ageism thing, but just a symtom of something I still cannot put my finger on. I put myself on sabbatical after realizing that my needs were not being met on a regular basis by my job. While I'll allow short-term ROI to be negative, I will never allow my lon…

100% agree.

For a web position I have no idea why you would ask them to write a tree parser or binary search algorithm which I experienced not that long ago.

Asking about what happens at a low level when entering a URL however is a good question. Or perhaps asking how to do cross domain JSON requests etc...

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#69

Post by doktrin » Tue, May 07, 2013, 1:37 AM UTC

Justsignedup wrote: post #56

rthomas6 wrote: post #15

Isn't the author just experiencing imposter syndrome? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome Despite all his colleagues, friends, and coworkers telling him he is proficient, keeping current in the industry, coding for fun, contributing to open source, proactively bettering his coding style and knowledge, and knowing a lot of theory, his mediocre interviews are enough to convince him that he's a bad developer.…

Granted 10 is a bit much. But it depends on who to interview with. If you are good, there are consulting companies like ThoughtBot or PivotalLabs who hire good developers pretty easily. And their interview process is all about checking if you are good and get along with people rather than just if you know how to traverse obscure data structures. Imposter syndrome does sound quite right. Or the guy is just depressed p…

> Imposter syndrome does sound quite right. Or the guy is just depressed pretty hard.

Setbacks at the interview stage rank among the most depressing and confidence sapping experiences in my professional career. I think it could make anyone fairly depressed, but IANAD.

Re: I Am a Bad Developer

#70

Post by mseebach » Tue, May 07, 2013, 1:41 AM UTC

boyter wrote: post #60

mseebach wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should probably read up on why this is, in fact, important before your next interview. Just a free piece of advice. O(N^2) means that your operation gets n times slower each time n increases. 2000^2 is 4 million. (n log n = 6600) 200,000^2 is 40 billion. (n log n = 1 million)

I understand Big O. My point is for a lot of cases it doesn't matter, and just because someone can't throw off the top of their head the O complexity of some algorithm they just wrote in a stressful interview does not mean they don't understand the concepts. Besides a O(N log N) algorithm over 10 or 100 items is not going to cause any issues. In the case of your standard CRUD application that's what you are going to…

You're right that it matters very little if you can deduce the exact complexity right off the bat. But it DOES matter is if you can tell if an algorithm is closer to n^2 than log n. OR identify that n is low enough that it doesn't matter.

> Besides a O(N log N) algorithm over 10 or 100 items is not going to cause any issues. In the case of your standard CRUD application that's what you are going to be dealing with.

I think you mean n^2. n log n is generally considered pretty decent.

But you're wrong, I know from experience that simple CRUD apps can suffer from grindingly poor performance, caused by, let's say, optimistic assertions of data volumes.