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> Have you ever done a hard leetcode problem? Yes. I used to compete on CodeForces regularly. > Clearly the icon code was delegated to some intern or perhaps

> Have you ever done a hard leetcode problem? Yes. I used to compete on CodeForces regularly. > Clearly the icon code was delegated to some intern or perhaps a child of one of the developers, because the bar is stupid high there just to have a conversation with a hiring manager. You're implying that the developers of Microsoft can't be computer science illiterate, because a computer science illiterate couldn't possibly pass through the recruitment funnel that you experienced. But we know this code exists. Somebody wrote it. Somebody reviewed it. Somebody tested it. Everybody involved in this process thought "yeah, this is good enough", when it's clearly not good enough. Anyone with as little as CS101 experience would not write crap like this in the first place, so it's really hard to argue that the developers at Microsoft are computer science literate.

fingerlocks 6y ago
The code was likely written in the early 90s when the barrier to entry was much lower. It was a time when thousands of icons on your desktop wasn’t a use case worth considering, much less testable. That seems more plausible than all the developers being illiterate.
- baobabKoodaa 6y ago
  > The code was likely written in the early 90s when the barrier to entry was much lower. You're probably right about that. > That seems more plausible than all the developers being illiterate. I'm not saying all developers are CS illiterate, but most are.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  That's not true at all. Many many people save everything they touch to Desktop, so it builds up cruft over time. There are ancient jokes about it. And computers were slower then brute-forcing big-O complexity was less feasible. And the "barrier to entry" gets lower as an org gross and needs to higher thousands of people and get less picky. I'm sure that MS doesn't require people to ace the hard leetcode problem to get an offer. It's just there to provide a broad picture of algorithm memory and coding speed (which is a stupid metric, not a "high" metric).
- rasz 6y ago
  >The code was likely written in the early 90s This is easily falsifiable by running a test case (create 1000 icons on desktop) in windows 7, 2000, XP and 98.

fingerlocks 6y ago

The code was likely written in the early 90s when the barrier to entry was much lower. It was a time when thousands of icons on your desktop wasn’t a use case worth considering, much less testable. That seems more plausible than all the developers being illiterate.

baobabKoodaa 6y ago
> The code was likely written in the early 90s when the barrier to entry was much lower. You're probably right about that. > That seems more plausible than all the developers being illiterate. I'm not saying all developers are CS illiterate, but most are.
alisonkisk 6y ago
That's not true at all. Many many people save everything they touch to Desktop, so it builds up cruft over time. There are ancient jokes about it. And computers were slower then brute-forcing big-O complexity was less feasible. And the "barrier to entry" gets lower as an org gross and needs to higher thousands of people and get less picky. I'm sure that MS doesn't require people to ace the hard leetcode problem to get an offer. It's just there to provide a broad picture of algorithm memory and coding speed (which is a stupid metric, not a "high" metric).
rasz 6y ago
>The code was likely written in the early 90s This is easily falsifiable by running a test case (create 1000 icons on desktop) in windows 7, 2000, XP and 98.