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Many excellent developers earned degrees in areas other than CS, or are self-taught and have demonstrably first-rate minds, well worth the salaries on offer.

• sunstone 8y ago
  Don't interpret my statement as a value judgement about the candidates, it's not. A guy who just got a phd in physics would probably have problems with these "programming as math" problems. I was just stating why these types of problems are being used. It's like a secret handshake.
  • hpcjoe 8y ago
    Yeah, some of us (phd) physicists do have these problems. More interestingly, some of the problems on places like hackerrank, which are expressed as math problems have fundamental problems in that the answers they posit as being correct are not. I dealt with one such failure, where one could write down an closed form solution for a problem in complex analysis that the author mistakenly assumed was a number theory problem. They did not comprehend that their answer was nonsensical.
    • sunstone 8y ago
      Well it's true that the ignorance of some of these company's (hiring process) is in fact pretty insulting to the kind of people they really want to hire. Compare that poor souls experience with Elon Musk's interview question for a tech hiring position, "So, tell me about a time you had a really hard technical problem to solve and how you did it?" The difference is night and day.