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My first thought, about the sub-matrix interview question you posed, is that it's a younger person's game. The last time Linear Algebra entered my mind was in t

• geebee 11y ago
  I don't mean to sound too cynical when I mention organizational savvy. These people don't create the illusion of a contribution, they really make the contribution. It just isn't all based on technical skill. Experience has shown me that people (managers, senior developers who have delegating authority, and so forth) have trouble resisting the temptation to take the interesting work for themselves and assign the difficult, risky, and often dreary and dead end work elsewhere. Socially savvy developers are able to avoid these projects and instead end up on teams where they do interesting, relevant work that aligns well with their own interests and builds a lasting skill set. They don't end up debugging the old perl script that migrates data from peoplesoft to oracle and/or porting it to python. They end up on relevant and interesting data science, UI, or infrastructure projects, where they can learn tremendously. They are able to work on projects that align closely with their own personal interests and passions, which keeps them motivated (for instance, if they aren't into UI or Javascript, perhaps they work on a high profile machine learning or infrastructure project). They don't emerge two years later with deep understanding of a legacy system that mainly irritates the organization, they emerge with a skill set that aligns closely with the exciting new direction an organization wants to take. Again, I don't want to sound cynical, they also earn this through excellent technical skills, hard work, and meaningful contribution. But it does require social and organizational savvy to make sure your career trajectory doesn't get derailed. Almost every time someone looks up in the org and says "yeah, well, that programmer is just a technical badass", this is true, but I guarantee you there was exceptional social and organizational savvy behind that ascent as well.
  • bpyne 11y ago
    I didn't take your comment as cynical. Perhaps I worded my response poorly. I didn't mean to imply anything insidious about the people who are great technically and understand organizational "politics". I appreciate people who are bright along those varied dimensions much more as I get older.
    • geebee 11y ago
      Yeah, sorry, the way I wrote that below your comment probably made it seem like a response. It didn't seem like you were implying anything insidious, I just read your comment and worried that I might have sounded cynical, and posted below what you had written.
• jongraehl 11y ago
  That problem has nothing to do with linear algebra. I like it! Presumably the submatrix size is limited, or there are negative numbers. Personally I'd precompute the submatrix sums S[r,c] for row 1...r and col 1...c in r*c steps, which will then allow you to give the sum for any submatrix in constant time.
• pixelp3 11y ago
  "it's a younger person's game." If you expect to work on projects like Google Maps/Earth, Android, search, images (machine learning), cardboard VR, gmail, etc. etc. and don't have an understand of algorithms or data structures, then Google isn't really the place for you. You can't expect "frameworks" or libraries to do everything for you
  • deleted 11y ago
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