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I am a quite good bad programmer

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Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#121

Post by [deleted] »

adhoc32 wrote: post #45
metric10 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Also cache matters a lot. If n is small an array is always faster by a big margin.

[deleted]

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#122

Post by rnk »

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 danger is whenever anyone feels like asking others to check out there pretty good work, someone will inevitably find problems. It's just life and our limits as humans. What I have noted is the people that carry themselves as huge geniuses are the ones who make huge oversights. The best is someone quietly humble, doing awesome work, has depth when you ask them.

I am sure if you were in the dev field for years without a degree then you'd get tired of being second guessed for not having that piece of paper from a college.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#123

Post by hansvm »

jimmywetnips wrote: post #99
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…

So I was building a side hustle right before I had to switch to job hunting due to illness. The side hustle is sooo enjoyable to me since I get to finally solve problems I've heard about tangentially but never got to work on in my day jobs. I also don't mind leetcode, strictly as a way to learn esoteric algorithms that don't show up in 99% of crud engineering. It's also a fun game. aka facebook quizes for nerds. But…

> In what world would anyone implement their own matrix operations?

In any world where their matrices are "special" -- big, small, scattered across the internet, high read/write ratio, informationally independent columns with 0.01% error tolerable, poorly conditioned, blockwise sparse, used as a sub-component in differentiating anything hairy (like a function of eigenvalues), ....

You can often get halfway decent results stringing together existing matrix primitives, but throw in a 50 clock cycle latency budget, a $5k per-job compute budget, or all sorts of other constraints and you're just as likely to find >>10x performance that you left lying on the table (assuming your matrices are at all special, which is common but not at all guaranteed in arbitrary domains).

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#124

Post by Kiro »

kevinfiol wrote: post #117
Kiro wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But OP wasn't bragging about their 9gager project. Also, isn't it possible to be a good programmer but write bad code sometimes? Perhaps OP's best work just isn't on display. Trying to give the benefit of the doubt, but I generally don't think one toy Github project is conclusive evidence of anything, really.

The 9gager project is at the top of his site (https://www.c2kb.com/). It's definitely on display.

> Trying to give the benefit of the doubt

Why? Even if he's actually a really good programmer like he claims, it's a massive display of hubris. We should encourage humbleness.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#125

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ted_bunny wrote: post #120
majjgepolja wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder how much the culture of standardized testing has contributed to this pattern. The idea that it's somehow unfair to test relevant skills and knowledge because previous exposure comes down to simple chance. That for a test to be "objective" it should only ask about abstract matters no one would ever reasonably encounter. It strikes me as sort of essentialist. It also seems sort of contradictory... if experienc…

> if experience in the field is one of the most important criteria, why are they implicitly avoiding testing for that?

That's easy. No one wants to hire "olds."

Since companies are now run by twenty-something CEOs, no one wants to hire people that make the CEO uncomfortable.

It really is that simple. Basic bigotry. In my experience, many companies don't even try to hide it. Recruiters are awful.

I just learned that if I see a binary tree problem, the company is just yanking my chain. It's not worth trying.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#126

Post by jbn »

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.

the nitpicker in me wants to say that the hash key can change (and it works if you rehash items whose key changed), but lookup by key will fail because the item will landed in the bucket of its original hash... but yes keys can't change if you want your values to be retrievable by key.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#127

Post by caviv »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #43

Reading through your post, I am noticing some trivial English mistakes that are common to non-native speakers. It's worth knowing that while you have successfully articulated everything, some people will still see your mistakes as red flags for future communication. Some might even assume that you will be making trivial code mistakes, too; despite there being no evidence of that. That kind of prejudice is common, and…

That is true. I am not a native English speaker. I should work on my English skill though.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#128

Post by caviv »

dehrmann wrote: post #96

> Still I will score quite low in job interview questions ... > I never "studied" computer science in a regular way, You never really mentioned algorithms, and your only mention of data structures was "usage of [hash tables] instead of searching arrays and many other small things that actually enhance the code performance." While you don't need them all the time, a good understanding of common data structures and alg…

I agree. It is not that I am trying to ace code interviews - I am making enough income and I am not searching for another job. It is more a question of am I good enough or not? - Since I agree I am not good at algorithms (I think I quite fair in data structures) I can still create good software.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#129

Post by kevinfiol »

Kiro wrote: post #124
kevinfiol wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But OP wasn't bragging about their 9gager project. Also, isn't it possible to be a good programmer but write bad code sometimes? Perhaps OP's best work just isn't on display. Trying to give the benefit of the doubt, but I generally don't think one toy Github project is conclusive evidence of anything, really.

The 9gager project is at the top of his site ( https://www.c2kb.com/ ). It's definitely on display. > Trying to give the benefit of the doubt Why? Even if he's actually a really good programmer like he claims, it's a massive display of hubris. We should encourage humbleness.

> The 9gager project is at the top of his site (https://www.c2kb.com/).

Oh, I didn't see that.

Re: I am a quite good bad programmer

#130

Post by pojzon »

andy_ppp wrote: post #27

For a recent interview I was asked to build an IOC dependency injection library in 2h and the task was made “deliberately” unclear according to the interviewer. So I spent 2 days researching IOC libraries, building some nice examples of how it should work to get a feel for the API, writing tests up front, writing the library and adding docs. Then I got an interview! Fantastic I thought, I passed the technical with my…

This reminded me about obe interview I had a year ago related to environments management in IaC.

The Senior Architect that interviewed me asked a question about correct infrastructure state management giving as an example their current infrastructure, giving me a hint that number of environments will grow expenentionally.

Ive shortly explained to him that the architecture they chose will be really hard to maintain when the numbers of environments grow past single digit numbers and a better approach would be to store the state per part of environment.

He got really mad at me for pointing that out (on the meeting were also other ppl) and tried to force me to chose the same approach as he did. I refused and proposed IMHO a better solution.

Long story short - did not get this job. So yes, sometimes ppl will dump you because you are overqualified and not only underqualified.

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