3 ms·

No problem will present in such an easy way as "oh just apply BFS". As part of a big project you often have to use many different algorithms for sub parts, ofte

No problem will present in such an easy way as "oh just apply BFS". As part of a big project you often have to use many different algorithms for sub parts, often modify them to suit constraints. I think the HN crowd is heavily inclined to web apps and also front end. I can't tell you how important fundamental CS knowledge is for backend. I bet you can't use a library or API for how caches work or when paging happens. Knowing these things makes you a well rounded engineer ready to tackle different problems. I can trust you to write a mobile app or work on some part of a self driving car because you have the building blocks to do so. Most of the comments in such threads have no interest in interesting and diverse jobs because "why bother, when will I use this". To any new grad, yes the interviews can be better but please spend time on these things at school. They are an investment in your career's stock.

Benjammer 8y ago
I mean, I've built and released multiple mobile apps (commercial and enterprise) on both platforms for multiple companies. They've all been mostly successful at doing what the company needed them to do. They look fairly nice as well. And I don't have this kind of fundamental, "what do you mean 'google it' are you a complete and total fucking moron!?" attitude about anything in software. I routinely browse through google results (mostly SO/Medium) about very basic concepts just to read the words again and re-warm those caches in my brain.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  It’s possible to have to solve issues like this even inside of app development. Think back to every time your app has performed poorly: has there been any cases where you didn’t know how to make it faster without giving up in the way you had designed it? Maybe the app was reading from the disk to populate your data model, and that was too slow? Maybe you were performing an O(n) operation for each row in your table view?
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Benjammer 8y ago

I mean, I've built and released multiple mobile apps (commercial and enterprise) on both platforms for multiple companies. They've all been mostly successful at doing what the company needed them to do. They look fairly nice as well. And I don't have this kind of fundamental, "what do you mean 'google it' are you a complete and total fucking moron!?" attitude about anything in software. I routinely browse through google results (mostly SO/Medium) about very basic concepts just to read the words again and re-warm those caches in my brain.

saagarjha 8y ago
It’s possible to have to solve issues like this even inside of app development. Think back to every time your app has performed poorly: has there been any cases where you didn’t know how to make it faster without giving up in the way you had designed it? Maybe the app was reading from the disk to populate your data model, and that was too slow? Maybe you were performing an O(n) operation for each row in your table view?

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