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I suppose that depends on what a programmer is asked to do. There are many roles and not all of them need the same thing regarding knowledge, computer science o

I suppose that depends on what a programmer is asked to do. There are many roles and not all of them need the same thing regarding knowledge, computer science or abstract thinking. If you are in a position where you mostly do the same thing over and over inside a relatively complete framework for a managed or scripting language, you are unlikely to find yourself building data structures, algorithms or understand what a query planner in an RDBMS might be up to. Those positions are far more prevalent than people might think. On the other side are the people that have to make sure that they get as much speed and/or as little memory usage as possible because they work on software that will scale (i.e. a small data structure that is used to keep track of filesystem allocations - you don't want a slow structure that also eats up a lot of disk space). But there are far fewer people that actually do that, and in theory far fewer people are needed to do that because a 'good enough' filesystem will fit all of those people from the other category. If one filesystem developer can support 100 million managed-language-framework-MVC-website engineers it's a pretty good scale.

a_t48 7y ago
Speaking as someone who has had to write performance critical data structures and also someone who does well with whiteboard interviews - there is a large difference between writing an algorithm with the advantage of having time to read, reason, and test your code and doing it on a whiteboard. There are many people who would do a fine job as a filesystem developer but might not be able to pass the interview for it. The current situation benefits me personally in many ways, but I recognize that it's unfair to many other people.
- oneplane 7y ago
  Yes, that is true. At the same time, most of those interviews are of course more about finding out how a person performs under pressure and how a person thinks rather than how well the white boarded shell sort for red-black trees with double-rot13 'encryption' would be usable in the real world. At the same time I'd hope that we get better at asking questions rather than repeating the same nonsense in every interview. The more people we can work with, the better. Because maybe not everyone is a fit for the position we had in mind, but maybe a less complex position could be filled that way. Often the interviews are rather binary (due to it often targeting a vacancy instead of a workforce role) costs everyone involved much more than it ideally should.

a_t48 7y ago

Speaking as someone who has had to write performance critical data structures and also someone who does well with whiteboard interviews - there is a large difference between writing an algorithm with the advantage of having time to read, reason, and test your code and doing it on a whiteboard. There are many people who would do a fine job as a filesystem developer but might not be able to pass the interview for it. The current situation benefits me personally in many ways, but I recognize that it's unfair to many other people.

oneplane 7y ago
Yes, that is true. At the same time, most of those interviews are of course more about finding out how a person performs under pressure and how a person thinks rather than how well the white boarded shell sort for red-black trees with double-rot13 'encryption' would be usable in the real world. At the same time I'd hope that we get better at asking questions rather than repeating the same nonsense in every interview. The more people we can work with, the better. Because maybe not everyone is a fit for the position we had in mind, but maybe a less complex position could be filled that way. Often the interviews are rather binary (due to it often targeting a vacancy instead of a workforce role) costs everyone involved much more than it ideally should.