I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011) • Hacker News Board

Re: I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

#151

Post by dharbin » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 6:50 PM UTC

DigitalSea wrote: post #45

This is what really irks me about the industry as a whole. Large companies like Facebook and Google have hiring processes in place that aim to weed out the strong from the weak by making them solve complex algorithmic puzzles and solve them on a whiteboard, and for larger companies like Facebook or Google who have massive troves of data, this kind of makes sense to me, but only if you're hiring a programmer to work w…

New web frameworks are making web development a more difficult problem, and Google's biasing of their hiring process towards "puzzle-solvers" has given birth to the poster-child of such complexity: AngularJS. AngularJS takes web development from something inelegant but simple into something inelegant and convoluted. I miss the days when web developers didn't need to add "transclusion," "directives", and "providers" into their vocabulary.

Re: I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

#152

Post by titanomachy » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 6:54 PM UTC

sriku wrote: post #123

Yup. The way I like to express this is as follows - It took Einstein about 10 years to formulate the general theory of relativity, needing no further experimental input into the work during this period. A few other scientists such as Wheeler, Schwarzschild and others, not to mention mathematicians like Riemann, put in at least as many "top scientist years" of time - about 20 TSYs in all, conservatively. The core cont…

> needing no further experimental work

General relativity is an incredibly impressive theory, even more so when you take into account how few experimental observations were required to formulate it. Basically "the speed of light is the same in any frame of reference" and "being in a gravitational field is (locally) indistinguishable from being in an accelerated reference frame". (For the second one, think about being in a rocket ship accelerating at a constant rate... you feel a force pushing you into the floor, just like you would if you were standing on the Earth's surface.)

If those two things are true, then GR is the only logical conclusion... but we might have gone another 100 years without reaching that conclusion if it hadn't been for Einstein.

Re: I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

#153

Post by ryanchamp_ICE » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 6:58 PM UTC

I'm not going to get into the fake programmer vs real programmer thing, but I will mention the thing that most excites me about programming. For the the author it was "design," and for me it's similar: communication.

I love being able to take a fuzzy idea, decompose it into discrete (and concrete parts) and then transposing that idea into programming language in such a way that not only solves the problem, but also communicates clearly what the original intent/idea/solution is.

Re: I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

#154

Post by computerjunkie » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:01 PM UTC

Smudge wrote: post #102

> Could you please solve this algorithmic puzzle within half an hour? I failed. Hiring decision made. End of story. If that alone was the reason, then your interviewer did a bad job. The point isn't to trick you. It's to see how you work under pressure when presented with a tough problem. What is your thought process? Do you dive right in or do you take time to chew on it? What parts of your background can you draw o…

>>>If that alone was the reason, then your interviewer did a bad job.

Then most, if not all these of recruiters are bad. I like to think through things and take time solving problems. If I see myself doing something and struggling to complete it, I haven't thought it out properly or I have rushed into the problem.

Some people will call you "slow" which I find insulting. For example, When I read a book I like to read the actual sentences rather than skimming over them. I like perfecting details and that sometimes takes time.

Re: I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

#155

Post by Maken » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:03 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #68

panarky wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time I was a programmer, building CRUD apps for enterprises. I hated puzzles, too. Then I discovered quicksort, and graph search, and Bayesian inference, and Dijkstra, and Karatsuba. I'm still a programmer, but now I love puzzles, too.

> Then I discovered quicksort, and graph search, and Bayesian inference, and Dijkstra, and Karatsuba. I would guess most "discovered" those because they had to interview. The % of programmers who need to Karatsuba or Bayesian inference to finish their project is very much smaller than the % of programmers who thought "oh shit, I better learn this because Google and Facebook keep asking about graph theory". It it is p…

I don't get why people tend to think that computer science is something different from "actual programming". In the end everything you can program can be expressed formally and vice-versa, the only thing that changes is how much you abstract from the actual implementation, which is handy in order to catch defects in the approach you are taking to certain problem.

Re: I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

#156

Post by reverius42 » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:03 PM UTC

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #131

smacktoward wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're all programmers, but we're not all the same Which is a rebuttal to something I didn't actually say, but OK. Look, obviously there are all different kinds of programmers. Millions and millions of people program computers today, so there's no end to the ways you can slice them apart. There are kernel programmers and GUI programmers, mainframe programmers and mobile programmers, Lisp programmers and BASIC progra…

Without calling one group "REAL", it would be nice to have different words for different tiers of programmers. And I can't comment on the poster above, but when I do think of programming skill tiers, it's not at all about number of hours put in. Yes, if you're passionate about a problem it can mean you end up putting in extra time to solve it. But it's not about the time. It's about the passion . Similarly, it's not…

I take offense at your gross misconceptions. JavaScript is by no means an "easy" language, certainly not orders of magnitude easier than whatever it is you do. The skills of a "JavaScript developer" include combining object-oriented and functional design patterns to organize a codebase, efficiently managing asynchronous communication and state, profiling and optimizing rendering and execution performance across the CPU and graphics card, designing and implementing for network security (including testing for HTTP headers, XSS, CSRF, etc.). What is it you do again?

Re: I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

#157

Post by Maken » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:11 PM UTC

yen223 wrote: post #126

chavesn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea that you have repeated several times... > A front-end developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript will never EVER need to know how to write an algorithm. > In my 12 years as a developer thus far I have never needed to ... write an algorithm to markup some HTML > A developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript does not need to know algorithms whatsoever. > Only a developer working with data or writing…

You know the saying, " If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail "? I think the corollary to that is " If you don't have a hammer, nothing looks like a nail ". If you have little knowledge of graph theory, algorithms, and other such "esoteric nonsense", you wouldn't recognize situations where those will be helpful, which then reinforces your belief that algorithms are useless. I have seen too many times a pe…

This so much. I don't get how people can think that something so simply and straightforward as the time complexity of an algorithm is something superfluous that only belongs to some boring classes they took in university, and it has nothing to do with "real world problems".

Those people complaining about Google caring so much about their engineers being able to deal with basic algorithmic, instead, should wonder why every Google service is so fast.

Re: I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

#158

Post by rquantz » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:11 PM UTC

serve_yay wrote: post #37

smacktoward wrote: post #9

> I’ve been programming for 18 years now. Then congratulations, you are a programmer! Despite what you'll hear from people peddling various flavors of Kool-Aid, "programmer" isn't a personality type. It's a job description. If you program, you are a programmer, end of line, full stop. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.

Ditto if you don't like Star Wars, XCKD, comic books, etc.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. I'm pretty sure XKCD is part of the job description.

Re: I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

#159

Post by computerjunkie » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:15 PM UTC

MCRed wrote: post #79

This is a feature not a bug-- let me explain: Recruiting is not necessarily easy. But you can judge a company by how they recruit people. Their hiring process-- given that talent is so critical-- tells you a great deal about the company. If they do a terrible job, if they are arbitrary or capricious, or if they have discrimination as a policy (e.g.: I was in the room at Startup School when Zuckerberg said "don't hire…

-- Having a preference for ivy league. Google impeaches itself with this one in my mind.

This is one of the most common things I bump into when looking for a job, and Its not just Google. Its so disappointing because I didn't go to "insert_top_ten_university" because I couldn't afford it, competition was insanely difficult, and asking grades where so high.

I always ask myself if these companies that preach meritocracy and diversity is just lip service when all the folks mostly come from ivy/redbrick/Russell group universities. So disappointing.

Re: I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

#160

Post by Xyik » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:15 PM UTC

People forget there's a distinction between Computer Scientist / Data Scientist / Software Engineer. They are not one and the same, and depending on your job you may only need to be one of those three categories. You don't need to know how quick-sort works create a CRUD web application, but you sure need to know how to write clear, maintainable code in all areas from the stack. But if that's all you know you can't expect to excel at a job like generating the Facebook news feed which actually involves theoretical knowledge.