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I recently had a 4hr test app to model a particular set of scheduling requirements over a calendar year. I could not finish it satisfactorily in time, which tol
by rhizome 9y ago
I recently had a 4hr test app to model a particular set of scheduling requirements over a calendar year. I could not finish it satisfactorily in time, which told me that either I was a crap programmer (possible) or that there was some common algo for this purpose that I didn't know. Of course these two reasons may be the same one: crap programmer.
- WorldMaker 9y agoSimilarly, I've had a couple of these where my response is a detailed discussion of why the problem given was at least NP-Hard, and here's a good academic paper on the trade-offs of the most popular algorithm, which would take me a good several days to implement correctly (or even better here's this trusted open source implementation of it). To me, that feels like that research was a better use of my 4 hour block of time, but yet I've gotten feedback that I must be a crap programmer if I'm not going to waste 4 hours brute forcing my way to an unsatisfactory answer. I don't know how some of those companies work, but I'd much rather work smarter than harder and step 1 in the real world, to my judgment, is often "research the problem and see how other people solved it", whether that's via academic algorithm research papers or StackOverflow depends on the type of problem.
- uffjedn 9y agoThere is a third one where the deadline is knowingly set too low to see how you deal with time trouble.
- rhizome 9y agoThat thought did occur to me, but they denied me anyway, so :shrug:.