7 ms·

> Select candidates who are keenly interested in and knowledgeable about algorithms for positions where it's important (i.e. part of the regular course of devel

> Select candidates who are keenly interested in and knowledgeable about algorithms for positions where it's important (i.e. part of the regular course of development), not because of that slight chance there is one edge case where one adjustment to a more efficient algorithm might possibly be useful at some indeterminate point in the future. Well put! At the end of the day, it's way more important to get your product out to customers/users rather than holding a microscope over every line of code you write and endlessly obsessing over big O numbers. It's fine if you're in academia, but it can be a death knell if you're working in a crowded domain. You can always go back and improve code later; customers/users are not going to come back later.

dpark 10y ago
Customers won't necessarily come back after you rewrite your product to deal with all the perf problems your naive implementations caused. I'm all for striking the right balance with perf concerns, but in my experience that's not "just deal with it later". Giving no thought to performance is as bad as micro optimizing at the beginning.
- ashwinaj 10y ago
  True. It's a balance, it's hard, and there is no silver bullet. I believe I should learn from my mistakes and move on rather than have rabid obsession over big O. If something is obvious or caught by code reviews, fix it then and there else move on.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    I believe I should learn from my mistakes and move on rather than have rabid obsession over big O. It's not even an obsession. Those pieces of knowledge could be fully mastered in about a half hour. It's first principles knowledge, like chemistry or thermodynamics. I can tell in a minute that something like "Solar Freakin Roadways" is a scam, whereas so many people gave that scam literally millions of dollars. Knowledge is literally power, in a very concrete way that expresses itself directly as dollars! Instead of having some basic first principles knowledge to spot such things ahead of time, benefiting from the collective experience of your field, you'd rather just labor in ignorance and run into everything for the first time and get out the profiler? Imagine scaling that up to the size of the Amazon or Google workforce?
    - ashwinaj 10y ago
      We agree to disagree. I absolutely don't disagree with optimizing when it's obvious (two for loops instead of one, etc.) All I'm saying is that, when you have thousands of lines of code (millions?) and even more complicated/intricate connections in your head of different modules, all the while when trying to reach a deadline, things aren't as obvious. You have to make compromises, it's inevitable. Amazon or Google did not scale up magically in one go by following established guidelines. I am very certain they had growing pains and I know that they had "hacks"[0] while figuring out the right solution for the problem at hand. [0] As attested by a former Googler who works at my current workplace
      - stcredzero 10y ago
        I absolutely don't disagree with optimizing when it's obvious (two for loops instead of one, etc.) What we disagree with, is the expansion of one's knowledge of what constitutes "obvious." Many people would say that the scam nature of "Solar Freakin Roadways" was far from obvious. Other people would smack their foreheads and ask why some people didn't pay attention in middle school and high school physics!

dpark 10y ago

Customers won't necessarily come back after you rewrite your product to deal with all the perf problems your naive implementations caused. I'm all for striking the right balance with perf concerns, but in my experience that's not "just deal with it later". Giving no thought to performance is as bad as micro optimizing at the beginning.

ashwinaj 10y ago
True. It's a balance, it's hard, and there is no silver bullet. I believe I should learn from my mistakes and move on rather than have rabid obsession over big O. If something is obvious or caught by code reviews, fix it then and there else move on.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  I believe I should learn from my mistakes and move on rather than have rabid obsession over big O. It's not even an obsession. Those pieces of knowledge could be fully mastered in about a half hour. It's first principles knowledge, like chemistry or thermodynamics. I can tell in a minute that something like "Solar Freakin Roadways" is a scam, whereas so many people gave that scam literally millions of dollars. Knowledge is literally power, in a very concrete way that expresses itself directly as dollars! Instead of having some basic first principles knowledge to spot such things ahead of time, benefiting from the collective experience of your field, you'd rather just labor in ignorance and run into everything for the first time and get out the profiler? Imagine scaling that up to the size of the Amazon or Google workforce?
  - ashwinaj 10y ago
    We agree to disagree. I absolutely don't disagree with optimizing when it's obvious (two for loops instead of one, etc.) All I'm saying is that, when you have thousands of lines of code (millions?) and even more complicated/intricate connections in your head of different modules, all the while when trying to reach a deadline, things aren't as obvious. You have to make compromises, it's inevitable. Amazon or Google did not scale up magically in one go by following established guidelines. I am very certain they had growing pains and I know that they had "hacks"[0] while figuring out the right solution for the problem at hand. [0] As attested by a former Googler who works at my current workplace
    - stcredzero 10y ago
      I absolutely don't disagree with optimizing when it's obvious (two for loops instead of one, etc.) What we disagree with, is the expansion of one's knowledge of what constitutes "obvious." Many people would say that the scam nature of "Solar Freakin Roadways" was far from obvious. Other people would smack their foreheads and ask why some people didn't pay attention in middle school and high school physics!