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> haven't done in several years, eventually decades. This is the part I don't understand. What is your job that you never do anything related to data structur

> haven't done in several years, eventually decades. This is the part I don't understand. What is your job that you never do anything related to data structures or algorithms? I'd like to know so I can stay away from such jobs. I just can't imagine being happy with such a dead-end job that doesn't require me to think of solutions to problems. If these jobs can be done by any monkey with a brute-force approach, then let any monkey do them. I've got better things to do.

pjmlp 9y ago
Enterprise consulting for Fortune 500 companies, working with distributed teams that scale from a few developers up to a few hundreds. Sometimes there are actually cool projects, no issues with licenses for the likes of Oracle servers or Visual Studio Ultimate. Also I do get to enjoy life outside work with the people that actually matter to me. Downsides, well there are lots of politics, social skills matter as much as coding skills, sometimes projects go really wrong.
- moron4hire 9y ago
  What does any of that have to do with "not using algorithms"?
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Depends if the whiteboard questions are how to implement a hash table, or a B+ Tree sorting algorithm directly on hard disk minimizing read/writes per node, while constrained to a specific amount of RAM. Writing B+ Trees in such scenarios is not something that one does on daily enterprise coding. Yes, I had that question done to me at Google, on a phone interview.
    - moron4hire 9y ago
      That's funny, the last time I worked for a Fortune 500 company, I received major accolades for the cost savings and SLA improvement I achieved thanks to--get this--my knowledge of data structures an algorithms. If you don't know math, you can't argue you don't need it. You obviously never learned to use the tools available to you, so you don't know what you're missing out on.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        I surely do know math, lots of it, including from my time at CERN in high throughput cluster data analysis. Just I don't need to use most of it for doing enterprise CRUD applications. I am speaking in general for others and the current state of the industry, I seldom failed any whiteboard exercise.

pjmlp 9y ago

Enterprise consulting for Fortune 500 companies, working with distributed teams that scale from a few developers up to a few hundreds. Sometimes there are actually cool projects, no issues with licenses for the likes of Oracle servers or Visual Studio Ultimate. Also I do get to enjoy life outside work with the people that actually matter to me. Downsides, well there are lots of politics, social skills matter as much as coding skills, sometimes projects go really wrong.

moron4hire 9y ago
What does any of that have to do with "not using algorithms"?
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Depends if the whiteboard questions are how to implement a hash table, or a B+ Tree sorting algorithm directly on hard disk minimizing read/writes per node, while constrained to a specific amount of RAM. Writing B+ Trees in such scenarios is not something that one does on daily enterprise coding. Yes, I had that question done to me at Google, on a phone interview.
  - moron4hire 9y ago
    That's funny, the last time I worked for a Fortune 500 company, I received major accolades for the cost savings and SLA improvement I achieved thanks to--get this--my knowledge of data structures an algorithms. If you don't know math, you can't argue you don't need it. You obviously never learned to use the tools available to you, so you don't know what you're missing out on.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      I surely do know math, lots of it, including from my time at CERN in high throughput cluster data analysis. Just I don't need to use most of it for doing enterprise CRUD applications. I am speaking in general for others and the current state of the industry, I seldom failed any whiteboard exercise.