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I'd buy it. - 17 years ago I was pretty good with Microchip PIC microcontroller assembly. (Haven't touched it since.) Today, I'd have to pull the datasheets an

I'd buy it. - 17 years ago I was pretty good with Microchip PIC microcontroller assembly. (Haven't touched it since.) Today, I'd have to pull the datasheets and spend a few days re-reading them to remember much of any of it. - 9 years ago I worked heavily with a large, legacy perl code base and wrote a bunch of internal web apps in perl. Again, I haven't touched it since and again it would take me a while to get back up to speed on that language stack. - As recent as 3 years ago I was heavily into a 200~300k loc PHP code base that did some pretty complex stuff (think ERPish ). Again, I haven't touched it much since then and again it would take me a few days to a week or so to get back into the swing of working on that code base. This kind of knowledge is highly perishable if you don't use it everyday. You quickly find yourself moving from "knowing" something to "knowing how to find" an answer to "how did that go again?". It's just the nature of the business. It doesn't mean you aren't good at or capable of picking those things back up, it just means you may need a quick refresher. Not being allowed to use references makes that artificially worse.

st1x7 6y ago
I think that you're being to generous to the author. Your examples are true but a job interview doesn't ask you to refamiliazire yourself with a codebase or a tech stack, it asks whether you're familiar with algorithms, data structures and basic logic in any C-style language. That's a way more general skill than the details of your old assembly codebase. The article omits what the author's experience is and when they say "I've spent 15 years working as a developer and a strategist at leading investment banks", I suspect that their role was much heavier on the strategist side and only now are they realising that they haven't been a developer for the past 15 years.
- emeraldd 6y ago
  That's only partially true. Having dealt with these from both sides, I'd say you need to be familiar enough with some language (not necessarily c-style) to be able to write code on the fly ...

st1x7 6y ago

I think that you're being to generous to the author. Your examples are true but a job interview doesn't ask you to refamiliazire yourself with a codebase or a tech stack, it asks whether you're familiar with algorithms, data structures and basic logic in any C-style language. That's a way more general skill than the details of your old assembly codebase. The article omits what the author's experience is and when they say "I've spent 15 years working as a developer and a strategist at leading investment banks", I suspect that their role was much heavier on the strategist side and only now are they realising that they haven't been a developer for the past 15 years.

emeraldd 6y ago
That's only partially true. Having dealt with these from both sides, I'd say you need to be familiar enough with some language (not necessarily c-style) to be able to write code on the fly ...