Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
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Re: Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
#2> Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
And that might be a good thing. How often does a normal software engineer have to write bubble sort from scratch in his daily life? If someone from my team came to me telling me he had to sort an array and wrote bubble sort from scratch, then I'd probably not be very happy with that unless there is a really good reason to spend that time on it rather than using an existing solution.
Re: Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
#3> Programmers can’t write algorithms without help And that might be a good thing. How often does a normal software engineer have to write bubble sort from scratch in his daily life? If someone from my team came to me telling me he had to sort an array and wrote bubble sort from scratch, then I'd probably not be very happy with that unless there is a really good reason to spend that time on it rather than using an exi…
Purely anecdotally: I've seen online discourse that suggests that the complex nature of the modern web requires FE devs be able to keep at least a couple efficient data-structure traversal tools in their toolbox.
Anyone with more experience could probably chime in.
Re: Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
#4String length in Python is maybe too much exaggeration unless someone hasn’t wrote Python for a long time.
But, algorithms? Sure! Nobody remembers them for ever. Often you at least need to read how the algorithm works before implementing it. Obviously for most devs it is faster to just search for a sample implementation or a pseudocode.
Re: Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
#5> Programmers can’t write algorithms without help And that might be a good thing. How often does a normal software engineer have to write bubble sort from scratch in his daily life? If someone from my team came to me telling me he had to sort an array and wrote bubble sort from scratch, then I'd probably not be very happy with that unless there is a really good reason to spend that time on it rather than using an exi…
Purely anecdotally: I've seen online discourse that suggests that the complex nature of the modern web requires FE devs be able to keep at least a couple efficient data-structure traversal tools in their toolbox. Anyone with more experience could probably chime in.
Yes, being able to write a DFS is definitely a good thing. For more complex stuff I don't mind if you need to look it up.
Re: Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
#6Yet another article showcasing how the tech interview process is fundamentally flawed.
Personal anecdote: I recently underwent an interview process for a position in my field of expertise (computer vision) consisting of multiple in-person stages, whiteboard coding, product design and a take-home assignment that required developing a foundational (bubble-sort like) algorithm from scratch. After successfully completing all of these hurdles, I ended up with a low-ball offer targeting entry-level candidates. If we could have discussed the compensation up front, I wouldn’t even have bothered.
Re: Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
#7> Programmers can’t write algorithms without help And that might be a good thing. How often does a normal software engineer have to write bubble sort from scratch in his daily life? If someone from my team came to me telling me he had to sort an array and wrote bubble sort from scratch, then I'd probably not be very happy with that unless there is a really good reason to spend that time on it rather than using an exi…
I suppose that depends on what a programmer is asked to do. There are many roles and not all of them need the same thing regarding knowledge, computer science or abstract thinking.
If you are in a position where you mostly do the same thing over and over inside a relatively complete framework for a managed or scripting language, you are unlikely to find yourself building data structures, algorithms or understand what a query planner in an RDBMS might be up to. Those positions are far more prevalent than people might think.
On the other side are the people that have to make sure that they get as much speed and/or as little memory usage as possible because they work on software that will scale (i.e. a small data structure that is used to keep track of filesystem allocations - you don't want a slow structure that also eats up a lot of disk space). But there are far fewer people that actually do that, and in theory far fewer people are needed to do that because a 'good enough' filesystem will fit all of those people from the other category. If one filesystem developer can support 100 million managed-language-framework-MVC-website engineers it's a pretty good scale.
Re: Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
#8Whenever this comes up, I can only assume that people are talking about very different sorts of technical interviews than I’ve ever been subject to. I’ve been working as a programmer for 25 years now and must have been through at least two dozen technical interviews in that time (one just a couple of years ago) and I’ve never had this level of pedantry thrown at me. It sounds like the poster has been rejected from a job interview for missing a semicolon or writing “length” instead of “len”. Maybe I’ve just been lucky? I did once have somebody ask me if I knew SQL - I said I did since I had written some queries using it, but not much. He asked me what command was used to add data into a database. I didn’t know (like I said, I knew the query syntax, but that was about it). That seems to me to have been a very reasonable question to ask, and a good, quick way to figure out that I didn’t really have much experience with SQL.
Re: Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
#9Shouldn't be a surprise; the person who wrote the algorithm without help took more than 15 minutes, and got a paper or a PhD out of it.
Re: Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
#10> Programmers can’t write algorithms without help And that might be a good thing. How often does a normal software engineer have to write bubble sort from scratch in his daily life? If someone from my team came to me telling me he had to sort an array and wrote bubble sort from scratch, then I'd probably not be very happy with that unless there is a really good reason to spend that time on it rather than using an exi…
I agree, what's more important IMHO is education/knowledge of existing data manipulation, after all 99% of the work is reuse not pure creation (incremental vs pure innovation).
Algorithmicians (? - well... algorithm researchers, obviously) and programmers are not working in the same field of work, even though the boundary might seem thin for most, there's a world between both.
Must all painters be artists?