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3 years of learning will only land you very junior level positions. In 3 years you will barely learn how to write crappy code and a few technologies. I've writ
by rorrr 15y ago
3 years of learning will only land you very junior level positions. In 3 years you will barely learn how to write crappy code and a few technologies.
I've written a few times here about how I interview people. Most of the candidates have BS degrees in comp sci, most of them have 3 to 15 years of work experience. Most of them cannot write a (correct) function to reverse a string.
- mahyarm 15y agoWhere are you interviewing? Are you putting tricky restrictions like you can't allocate a second array and other things like that?
- rorrr 15y agoI interviewed at a very large corporation. 3-4 interviews a week. We accepted any correct solution.
- jodrellblank 15y agoYou've said correct twice, but what do you mean by it? Do you give a spec they have to meet or a test set to compare against? Must they handle encodings/Unicode, or fail predictably in edge cases? Or are you talking about characters swapped, even/odd lengths/ empty strings, that's all?
- rorrr 15y agoOh, we usually ask a very simple version - function to return a reversed string that's passed as a parameter. It consists of English letters, it's not blank. You're not allowed to use the standard string reverse function/method. It never gets to edge cases. Most people can't even write the simple version. I'm pretty sure nobody can write the unicode-safe version during the interview, even the smartest developers I've worked with (I guess that depends on the language though).
- jcromartie 15y agoI recently had 2/5 candidates with Master's degrees in CS unable to give me a number in hex. I didn't ask them to write a program to do it, just to include it in the email subject when replying to a posting. Another 2/5 of them gave me awful code to do it. It's kind of sad.
- emmett 15y agoYes, this is true. They'd only be a passable programmer after 3 years, not a good one. But the main point is that a very junior developer position is actually a really good job for most people.