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I see a disturbing trend in industry especially in Bay area from my experience. Young engineers are bad at debugging, bad means real bad but good at programmin

I see a disturbing trend in industry especially in Bay area from my experience. Young engineers are bad at debugging, bad means real bad but good at programming puzzles. This points to the fact that people value puzzles over experience and in turn miss the big picture. Sure you can code up a balanced RB tree in 5 mins, but what will you do when packets start showing up in bursts on your service? Can you find out that on a live system? I despise this new Bro culture of mugging programming puzzles from leetcode and hackerank. Faltering at first real world challenge is not only disappointing, but an insult to craft of engineering. /Rant over

fancyfish 8y ago
Echoing this and an earlier thread...interviewers could have debugging exercises with an existing codebase. I have seen this ambitious approach at a few startups. Instead of asking yet another sorting algorithm or HackerRank brainteaser. Until the application process changes, the applicants won't change.
- convolvatron 8y ago
  interviewing is only a small part of the picture. mvp has so eroded the notion of correctness that whole organizations don't even look for bugs anymore. try upgrading the dependencies. wrap the service in a harness to make sure it gets restarted when it fails. forget about proactively looking for bugs, wait until they come in, and if you have time that week before they slip into the 'stale - never to be addressed' pile, spend a few minutes trying to reproduce and mark 'works for me'
draw_down 8y ago
It goes further, too. Hotshots who crank out cool-looking stuff with lots of problems under the covers get promotions and accolades; people who do really important maintenance work and fix all the stuff the hotshots didn't think of get the table scraps. Where I work, there is a regular time where an employee tells the whole company about something they fixed and why. It's a nice thought and all, but if the promotions and other material benefits still accrue to the people cranking out new stuff, it doesn't matter too much in my opinion.
kitanata 8y ago
The trend isn’t just in the Bay Area. I’m seeing the same thing in the Midwest.
fierro 8y ago
sorry what does "bro" culture have anything to do with the puzzle/algorithm heavy interview culture in the valley? That term is tossed around so much, and it doesn't seem to mean anything here

fancyfish 8y ago

Echoing this and an earlier thread...interviewers could have debugging exercises with an existing codebase. I have seen this ambitious approach at a few startups. Instead of asking yet another sorting algorithm or HackerRank brainteaser. Until the application process changes, the applicants won't change.

convolvatron 8y ago
interviewing is only a small part of the picture. mvp has so eroded the notion of correctness that whole organizations don't even look for bugs anymore. try upgrading the dependencies. wrap the service in a harness to make sure it gets restarted when it fails. forget about proactively looking for bugs, wait until they come in, and if you have time that week before they slip into the 'stale - never to be addressed' pile, spend a few minutes trying to reproduce and mark 'works for me'

draw_down 8y ago

It goes further, too. Hotshots who crank out cool-looking stuff with lots of problems under the covers get promotions and accolades; people who do really important maintenance work and fix all the stuff the hotshots didn't think of get the table scraps. Where I work, there is a regular time where an employee tells the whole company about something they fixed and why. It's a nice thought and all, but if the promotions and other material benefits still accrue to the people cranking out new stuff, it doesn't matter too much in my opinion.

kitanata 8y ago

The trend isn’t just in the Bay Area. I’m seeing the same thing in the Midwest.

fierro 8y ago

sorry what does "bro" culture have anything to do with the puzzle/algorithm heavy interview culture in the valley? That term is tossed around so much, and it doesn't seem to mean anything here