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I am a quite good bad programmer

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Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#101

Post by itronitron »

ergonaught wrote: post #74

Your list makes the case for being "good", but that doesn't matter. The "job interview questions" are largely popularized by people who do not understand hiring, and probably don't understand much of anything else, with a cargo cult mindless copy/paste of practices that don't actually apply to them. There is a niche of a niche of a niche of roles where deep specialized knowledge is actually a baseline requirement in…

It occurred to me just last week as I was reminiscing over some past interviews that while I have written a substantial amount of code, pseudocode, and algorithms it has never been while standing at a whiteboard.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#102

Post by sterlind »

metric10 wrote: post #40
johnthuss wrote: post #20

> I understands the usage of Hash / Map instead of searching arrays and many other small things that actually enhance the code performance I would consider this an assumed skill for any developer with a college degree. It’s basically the point of the entire Data Structures class, which is a degree requirement.

FWIW, actually, one thing I learned in practice that’s wasn’t highlighted in my Algorithms course: overhead (constant C) matters. You can feel good about yourself for choosing an algorithm that scales in O(lg n) time, but if your you ignore the cost of each operation (C) you might be slow. For example: 1. When n is small, an array is almost always better. Arrays have very little overhead compared to even a hash map.…

a good example of this is Fibonacci heaps. on paper they're great, but they result in egregious pointer chasing, while radix heaps are less flexible but can be backed by a contiguous array.

weirdly, in all my recent algorithm work, only the big-O has mattered (or it's all just NP-hard or even EXPTIME.)

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#103

Post by Kiro »

kevinfiol wrote: post #87
katsura wrote: post #75

I wanted to give you a completely objective opinion, so I went from gematrix.org > www.c2kb.com > 9gagrss.xyz and based on that and your user name I found this: https://github.com/caviv/9gager One thing, I think, you should be really careful about is how you handle user inputs, e.g. this line: https://github.com/caviv/9gager/blob/20ccaaf649af525fc7a0c1d... I validated this on the live site as well, and it was really…

To be fair, I write quite a bit of sloppy code when I program as a hobby, or if I'm trying to quickly hobble together something that just does what I need to do (and that includes random projects I throw up on Github).

The difference is that you don't create a whole post on HN just to humblebrag how good of a programmer you are.

This code is a disaster and the opposite of what OP describes. A clear case of Dunning–Kruger.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#104

Post by jimmywetnips »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #97

Lots of folks are good at doing the job but bad at interviewing for jobs. Interview prep is a massive industry. Like with any skill, practice helps. It sounds like you dont really care that you dont do exceptionally well at interview. But if you wanted to improve that skill you could focus some time on it. Think of another skill you only use once every year or two. You are not going to be fantastic at it. I've played…

And therein lies the problem that's been re-hashed 100s of times here. This biasis against people with families or people who are higher up who don't have time outside their jobs. A lot of friends who were jrs pulled weekend and late nights just cramming leetcode. It worked. But as a sr, who have tons of other things going on, with work and otherwise, there's just not enough time to do it.

The problem I think is that although there's harm done to the company in losing out on good engineers, the cost isn't attributable to individuals in the hiring chain. That cost is difused over time to everyone else and there's no accoutability. The next best alternative, the ones who could jump through the hoops will tend to be just as any other on average.

I think I have a pretty good sense of who the legitimate good vs bad engineers are. I'm always checking up on people we've denied or people I thought were bad but was overruled on. I'm not perfect but I have a better record than the teams in general. But that's because I have a vested interest in making the team good. The hr people, they don't really care since their incentives are just to get people funelling into the roles, and they have so many applicants that they have to rely on ai to auto filter, which is shit at finding real quality.

Good football players train for games, do well in games, and are hireable as long as they do well in their primary activity: playing and winning games. Good engineers CANNOT be hired unless they do training in a totally tangential direction, unless their job is literally algorithms all day working on a kernel team or something.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#105

Post by twobitshifter »

I think you’ve grouped many things into a good/bad spectrum, but in reality we’re talking about different qualities of a programmer.

* Productivity * Simplifying Complexity * Design * Knowledge * Documentation * …

Are all different things and it’s possible to be skilled at one and not another. Someone can be great at design but slow at getting the simplest things done, another may know a computer inside and out, but write zero documentation.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#107

Post by majjgepolja »

ergonaught wrote: post #74

Your list makes the case for being "good", but that doesn't matter. The "job interview questions" are largely popularized by people who do not understand hiring, and probably don't understand much of anything else, with a cargo cult mindless copy/paste of practices that don't actually apply to them. There is a niche of a niche of a niche of roles where deep specialized knowledge is actually a baseline requirement in…

And these are the people who post on LinkedIn as if their understanding of esoteric Leetcode string DP problems is essential for scaling Amazon and Google.

They may not quite understand their development or deployment environment but their knowledge of writing segment tree as a single dimension array in 15 minute is somehow essential to scaling the internal CRUD app these people end up working on.

Now everyone being interviewed by this person has to know by heart or magically derive on spot how to find minimum steps to obtain maximum length palindrome subsequence of even length from a string consisting of lower case letters, because apparently it's the gist of all computer science knowledge a developer will need.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#109

Post by KronisLV »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #55
tonyarkles wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an extraordinarily painful conversation with someone who had done pretty well in our DS class but didn’t have a ton of practical experience. Me: “why don’t you just use a hash table here? That array you’re iterating through each time has like 200,000 entries” Him: “I can’t. I need to be able to get both the key and the value and hash tables don’t store the key” Me: “…sigh, school has failed us again”

I had an extraordinarily painful conversation with experience programmers when I pointed out that the values that the hash key relyed upon must not change, for the life of the hash map.

> ...when I pointed out that the values that the hash key relyed upon must not change, for the life of the hash map.

Now I'm wondering about something like:

  MutableHashMap, Value>
You could probably have they key be a container object and allow changing its internal value, which would then communicate to the hash map that it belongs to, that it should do some internal changes:

  Entry, Value> entry = mutableHashMap.getEntryByKey("myKey");
  entry.setKey("myNewKey");
That logic could take an internal hash map, remove the element by the old key and add it with the new key. So, to an outside user it would seem like you can change the keys.

The only problem would be that depending on the language you're using, you wouldn't change the objects directly, but would use those containers and it would essentially just be some boilerplate around a regular hash map. For example, Java has MutableInt and similar classes, which here would be hooked up to the MutableHashMap that they belong to.

Then again, I can't come up with many cases where something like that would be nice to have, since if you want to "change" a key, you can just do the following manually:

  var ourValue = myHashMap.get("myKey");
  myHashMap.remove("myKey");
  myHashMap.put("myNewKey", ourValue);

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#110

Post by majjgepolja »

badlucklottery wrote: post #17
marginalia_nu wrote: post #4

You're "expected" to study for job interview questions. It's more a measure of willingness to jump through hoops than your competence. Developer interview questions in general has little to do with what you'll do as a developer, and what you're expected to know as a developer.

> It's more a measure of willingness to jump through hoops than your competence. I'd say it's more a measure of how well you can learn an arbitrary skill. They could change it to solving Sudoku puzzles, grading SAT essays, or wood carving and most of the same people who do well in leetcode interviews would pick up those skills and ace the interviews. But you don't need arbitrary skills, you need solid development ski…

> I'd say it's more a measure of how well you can learn an arbitrary skill.

Time is finite. You can learn to write better programs, or grind Leetcode. Leetcode interviews favor the one who can put enough time on the latter.

A better explaination is it's a chain reaction. People who know only to Leetcode enter the industry, and ask only Leetcode questions.

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