3 ms·
> Is that just me or is Big O just something people outside of university never get around to learn even though it’s simple? I think so. I reckon if I asked an
by LandR 6y ago
> Is that just me or is Big O just something people outside of university never get around to learn even though it’s simple?
I think so. I reckon if I asked any of the developers I work with "what is Big O" I wouldn't expect any of them to know, but maybe I would be pleasantly surprised. No, no I wouldn't. I have seen their code, they definitely don't know what Big O is.
- smabie 6y agoAre you sure? I've never worked with professional devs that aren't familiar with the usual algorithms and data structures. Whenever I interview I'm always asked the usual leetcode bullshit. Are there programming jobs that don't ask/require this stuff? I have met a lot of analysts and researchers that code Python for data science that know nothing of big O, but that's to be expected.
- LandR 6y agoYeah, I've had to explain to professional developers why them using a List was bad for their use case, they didn't know what else you can use apart from a List. I've had to explain what hash maps are. I've had to explain why nested foreach loops are bad. I've seen code where the dev wanted to create a collection of Foo, they didn't know how many Foos would be in the collection so they made an array that was far bigger than they needed. They then added all the items to the Array one by one, then performed a loop which went round the Array starting at the end and on each iteration it would check if the last item was null. They then resized the Array by 1 item to remove the null entry.... The loop did this until it hit an item that wasn't null... This in a language that has List<T> type... They at least had the sense to write a comment saying someone needed to look into this as it was slow for some reason... This wasn't a junior developer either, it was someone with 15+ years experience. This person would have no idea what Big O meant. I've seen nested foreach loops with a database call in the inner loop!