12 ms·

In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them),

In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ mattered. Now that I’m running workshops and talks professionally, posting publicly is _critical_. Moral of the story: if you enjoy posting in public and teaching in public, but you feel like its getting you nowhere career wise, maybe you are in the wrong career like I was. Once I decided to double down on my strengths and spent nights and weekends at public speaking training instead of grinding leetcode things started to click.

wpietri 5y ago
I think it depends a lot on the place. I'm hiring now and we actively appreciate things like mentoring and doing public work. I agree that people not feeling appreciated should try other things, but I think that includes different kinds of employers as well as different kinds of job.
- jameshush 5y ago
  I agree, I was in the California market for 7ish years so my experience is heavily skewed for that culture. That being said, I’m NOT bashing those interviews. I’ve been a hiring manager too, if I was able to offer double money and high prestige like a FAANG company I would have had a high filter too. I focused more on sourcing people through friends of friends so the interviews were more of a soft sale on my end than a leetcode grind.
N00bN00b 5y ago
Yep. I basically made the same remark. For a lot of positions they're just not looking for creative people, just chairs to fill. They want "good enough" and nothing more.
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  I don't see how having high enough standard means that they want "good enough".Do you want their hiring level to be even higher or what?
  - N00bN00b 5y ago
    >Do you want their hiring level to be even higher or what? I just described what I see. It's not about what I want or don't want. Personally I'm mostly indifferent, I'd say.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
k__ 5y ago
It helped me to get offers from companies, so I didn't have to apply for anything anymore. Sure, when I applied, I had to do dumb tests. But when a C or VP level asked me it was usually not an issue to get a job.
- Taylor_OD 5y ago
  This really depends. Are you talking about FANG+ type companies? Doesnt matter who you are you will probably have to whiteboard. Outside of FANG? I'm sure you can bypass many technicals with credentials.
  - booi 5y ago
    Most FAANG companies do actual coding now instead of whiteboarding :(
    - colordrops 5y ago
      Why the unhappy face? Is this considered a bad trend? I'm personally way better at online coding sessions than whiteboarding.
      - ant6n 5y ago
        Jotting down an algorithm and talking about complexity is probably easier than implementing it?
        maxioatic 5y ago
        A coding session usually implies something unrelated to algorithms. Whiteboarding is usually much more than "jotting down an algorithm".
    - raverbashing 5y ago
      Great to know, an editor is much easier than a whiteboard I'd much prefer it rather than scribbling in a whiteboard with an eraser that doesn't work and trying to put together the solution Whiteboard does work for higher level discussions, not for anything resembling code Lest they ask you to whiteboard FizzBuzz, that makes me want to leave the interview immediately.
cableshaft 5y ago
Yep. I've had a portfolio of full video games I've coded and released on my own, as the sole programmer, that could be played on the web, had my name credited on the title screen, and you could even see the code on some of them, and I proudly included the link on my resume. Never brought up during the interview process, I was still expected to take the coding tests, and if I did a little poorly on one question I almost always got passed, even though the games I made had plenty of things going on, and some were even finalists in game contests (one hosted by Microsoft, even). I don't bother keeping up a portfolio anymore (I am working on a new personal site again, but not to put on my resume).
- Hermel 5y ago
  Maybe you should have applied with smaller companies that don’t have bureaucratic hiring processes yet?
  - epicureanideal 5y ago
    Most small companies copy the bureaucratic hiring processes of the larger ones at this point.
    - bob1029 5y ago
      I'll never understand why business owners want to fail so badly. The principal advantage of small business is that you can happily ignore bureaucracy when it makes sense to. Some of our best employees are the ones who came in with the fewest credentials and the most to prove. There is no candidate I would refuse purely on the grounds of credentials. We are much more interested in side projects and work ethic than formal certifications or other pieces of expensive paper.
      - ivanbakel 5y ago
        >I'll never understand why business owners want to fail so badly. The principal advantage of small business is that you can happily ignore bureaucracy when it makes sense to. But how are you meant to know "when it makes sense to"? I imagine that lots of small businesses are run by owners who don't necessarily have the confidence to strike a new path in every facet of the business. If you're investing a lot of time and effort innovating on your product/service, it can also make sense to import a tried-and-tested hiring model wholesale from somewhere else. Of course, in a less generous sense that could be maligned as "cargo-culting", but if at the end of the day the planes show up (you make good-enough hires), you're not going waste time introspecting on the process.
jdenning 5y ago
Definitely. I use a link shortener to track visits to my portfolio links. (Almost) Nobody looks at your public work.
- ornornor 5y ago
  Same experience here. Everyone says you should spend your nights and weekends building a portfolio on top of your day job, but no one looks at it when you apply. And then you get put aside because you didn’t know for sure in an instant what is the result of `‘1’ + 1` in JavaScript.
- thefr0g 5y ago
  I mean why would someone want to visit your online portfolio if it looks like you didn't even put in enough effort to get a proper domain?
- driverdan 5y ago
  When possible I bypass shorteners so candidates won't know when I've looked, eg add + to the end of bit.ly links.
an_opabinia 5y ago
In my experience, for every engineering subordinate that turned out to be good that I didn't bother testing with leetcode, there were 19 who sucked and also failed their coding test, or sucked and we should have tested them. So far, among people who studied programming as their major in college, the best predictor was the prestige of the university they attended.
- mattmanser 5y ago
  If you've hired over 20 people, and 19 of them have been bad, it just sounds like there's something wrong with your process. It also sounds like you're hiring a lot of novices, which isn't what's being discussed really. The uni thing is not exactly a revelation. It's the same for every single field/job. Better uni, usually better worker. All you're actually saying is that novice programmers straight from uni mildly correlate in ability with SAT scores. Nothing surprising in that.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    >If you've hired over 20 people, and 19 of them have been bad, it just sounds like there's something wrong with your process. I think this is part of the reason for the widespread usage of take home / coding assignments etc. If you have a bad process making people do some work improves your result. I remember the first company I had with a friend in the late 90s and our process sucked. It was embarrassing, although thinking about it we still had a 50% success rate in technical quality of people we hired. If we had given tests to the people we didn't have someone to vouch for it would have meant we did not make the mistakes we did. And by saying we had a bad process we had a bad firing process as well. The bad hires we made really were catastrophic because we couldn't handle any part of the process.
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    Yes, the thing that is wrong with the process is that they didn't check to see if the person was able to write code.
- BlissWaves 5y ago
  I like leetcode as a hiring metric and I think it's the best measure to test out an engineer. Unless a company uses it basically to find people that implement the fastest algorithm(read: have memorized it already) in 30 minutes it can be a very very effective way of screening.
RandallBrown 5y ago
For a pure engineering role things like credits at large companies, online talks, side projects, etc. are all really great ways to get an interview. I can't really remember the last time I was turned down for an interview. You're totally right about the other part though. I've lost a lot of jobs I think I could have been great at because I'm really bad at whiteboard coding interviews.
- kebman 5y ago
  Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed continuous progress with several finished projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank sheet imp that they can mould wholly in their own image? Is real creativity and output really of no value to these guys?
  - epicureanideal 5y ago
    > Or is it that they want a blank sheet imp that they can mould wholly in their own image? Is real creativity and output really of no value to these guys? That's what I'm starting to suspect, and that suspicion is shared by several of my friends in the industry.
  - thewarrior 5y ago
    The book Disciplined Minds goes into some of this. It helps one understand the answers to questions like why companies prize things like performance on coding tests that don’t correlate very well to the job. Even FANGs are not looking for truly innovative engineers. Most of the innovation comes via acquisitions or when they hire some industry luminaries to lead projects. The rest are only there to fill in the lines and be highly productive coding machines that will learn the “syllabus” just like they learn to leet code. These deep technical skills don’t matter as much because a lot these highly paying companies don’t have work that is deeply technical. Their challenges are primarily around management and scaling the number of engineers. This requires reducing people down to something very simple and being able to treat engineers as fungible resources. Hiring and evaluating each person as a special snow flake is not the most profitable thing to do at large scales. This is exactly the thesis behind Paul Graham’s ideas on startups and innovation. The scaling of a large corporation inevitably jams up the gears of the system and a small team can completely outflank a large company with employees keeping more of the returns and the work being more fulfilling. Unfortunately the incumbents have sucked in most of the revenue so even though you regularly have small teams of people knocking out work that puts the biggies to shame making money is hard to impossible. So everyone on “Hacker news” is now left reverse engineering every detail of how big co works to get ahead .
lmilcin 5y ago
> In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I am interviewing a lot of people. I look very suspicious at these kinds of moves to try to impress me. I don't necessarily ignore, but I try to figure out if this is some kind of shallow engagement. It impresses me if you can stick to something meaningful and do it regularly for years but you can just as well hurt your chances if you propose 5 simple commits to random projects on Github to be your greatest accomplishment. A blog about programming is not going to impress me if you are still junior engineer. Rather, it is worrying. I always remind people to learn something first before you try to teach other people. I will still want to see you code yourself out of a paper bag.
- teknofobi 5y ago
  > I always remind people to learn something first before you try to teach other people. Teaching is one the greatest ways to learn and develop your relation and vocabulary for what you are currently learning. It’s one of the greatest tricks a good college class will pull, having students continually drag each other a step further as they learn something new and then have to explain it to their peers. Most blogging is this kind of “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”, so it’s seems to me you might be dismissing some eager learners if you think the act of blogging is self-important.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    > Teaching is one the greatest ways to learn and develop your relation and vocabulary for what you are currently learning Oh sure it is. I studied theoretical math and I found teaching other students math was great way to get it organized in my head. But we also had professor and I wasn't teaching anybody original ideas, just the material that was already written and defined. Now I have decades of development experience I still find explaining things to other people a very useful and efficient way to get my thoughts organized. I kinda exclude blogs with posts of the form "see, I have found something interesting today!" or "I just spent 5 hours solving this problem, writing down solution here so you don't have to waste time". This is fine. But if you have 3 years of experience in development and start writing blog posts criticizing OOP, that is definitely not going to help your case. I mean, it is highly unlikely you got enough experience and thinking done to even understand OOP, let alone start criticizing it.
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
> if I forgot how to write binary search The binary search algorithm isn't something you can "forget". For a literate programmer it's like forgetting how to write the letter 'A' or forgetting which pedal is the gas and which is the brakes.
- sedeki 5y ago
  I think the overall point is the risk of forgetting something judged as "fundamental."
  - Vvector 5y ago
    Can you clarify what you mean here? I would argue that any decent programmer could hack out a sorting routine, without having the code memorized. If you cannot write a binary search routine from scratch, how can you be expected to solve much bigger problems?
    - kragen 5y ago
      Sure, but there are a lot of subtle issues in both sorting and binary search. The simplest sorting routine is probably dumbsort: void dumbsort(int *p, int n) { for (int tmp, i = 1; i < n; i++) { if (p[i] < p[i-1]) tmp = p[i], p[i] = p[i-1], p[i-1] = tmp, i = 0; } } But it lives up to its name; I can't imagine any reason you should ever use this algorithm. It compiles to 16 instructions but it's O(N³). Insertion sort is more complicated—it compiles to 17 instructions—and is actually a reasonable thing to use in some circumstances: void isort(int *a, size_t n) { for (size_t i = 1; i < n; i++) { for (size_t j = i; j > 0; j--) { if (a[j-1] <= a[j]) break; int tmp = a[j]; a[j] = a[j-1]; a[j-1] = tmp; } } } That's because it has the lowest constant factor of all the O(N²) comparison sorts on common machines, so it's the absolute fastest way to sort small arrays. (On my laptop it sorts N items in 0.34 ns × N² ± 2%.) And it's also very fast for large arrays of nearly-sorted data, so it's a reasonable way to finish up after a rough quicksort. It took me about five minutes to write that, and it worked the first time I tested it. But that's in part because I find sort routines fascinating and I've been studying them, and programming in C, for almost 30 years. Even if it took you an hour or four hours and required a lot of debugging, you still might be a decent programmer. Especially for jobs where things are less well defined and you have to do a lot of debugging anyway! (By contrast, I've actually spent most of the last hour trying to write a properly working quicksort, the variant that finishes up with a single call to insertion sort, using both notes and a compiler. Of course it produces correct results because of the final insertion sort but it's not as efficient as it should be and I can't figure out why. Apparently I can't brain today... good thing I'm not in a job interview!)
sheikheddy 5y ago
What does ‘credits’ mean in this context?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
the_only_law 5y ago
Yeah I need to leave the industry. Problem is, not much else looks appealing. Most realistic pivots look more miserable and end up just being adjacent roles that remove all the parts of what I like about software development while becoming mostly what I don’t, likely with a much lower salary cap. I thought about doing something radical and going back to school, but I don’t have the time or money. Though this thread makes me want to look again.
whataremyvalues 5y ago
I've found careerexplorer.com to be a helpful tool for career planning and exploration. Knowing where I stand and what my values are also helps when it comes to navigating the professional environment.
jimbob45 5y ago
Where are you finding public speaking training? I’m asking because that’s a skill I would myself like to develop.

wpietri 5y ago

I think it depends a lot on the place. I'm hiring now and we actively appreciate things like mentoring and doing public work. I agree that people not feeling appreciated should try other things, but I think that includes different kinds of employers as well as different kinds of job.

jameshush 5y ago
I agree, I was in the California market for 7ish years so my experience is heavily skewed for that culture. That being said, I’m NOT bashing those interviews. I’ve been a hiring manager too, if I was able to offer double money and high prestige like a FAANG company I would have had a high filter too. I focused more on sourcing people through friends of friends so the interviews were more of a soft sale on my end than a leetcode grind.

N00bN00b 5y ago

Yep. I basically made the same remark. For a lot of positions they're just not looking for creative people, just chairs to fill. They want "good enough" and nothing more.

EvilEy3 5y ago
I don't see how having high enough standard means that they want "good enough".Do you want their hiring level to be even higher or what?
- N00bN00b 5y ago
  >Do you want their hiring level to be even higher or what? I just described what I see. It's not about what I want or don't want. Personally I'm mostly indifferent, I'd say.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

k__ 5y ago

It helped me to get offers from companies, so I didn't have to apply for anything anymore. Sure, when I applied, I had to do dumb tests. But when a C or VP level asked me it was usually not an issue to get a job.

Taylor_OD 5y ago
This really depends. Are you talking about FANG+ type companies? Doesnt matter who you are you will probably have to whiteboard. Outside of FANG? I'm sure you can bypass many technicals with credentials.
- booi 5y ago
  Most FAANG companies do actual coding now instead of whiteboarding :(
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Why the unhappy face? Is this considered a bad trend? I'm personally way better at online coding sessions than whiteboarding.
    - ant6n 5y ago
      Jotting down an algorithm and talking about complexity is probably easier than implementing it?
      - maxioatic 5y ago
        A coding session usually implies something unrelated to algorithms. Whiteboarding is usually much more than "jotting down an algorithm".
  - raverbashing 5y ago
    Great to know, an editor is much easier than a whiteboard I'd much prefer it rather than scribbling in a whiteboard with an eraser that doesn't work and trying to put together the solution Whiteboard does work for higher level discussions, not for anything resembling code Lest they ask you to whiteboard FizzBuzz, that makes me want to leave the interview immediately.

cableshaft 5y ago

Yep. I've had a portfolio of full video games I've coded and released on my own, as the sole programmer, that could be played on the web, had my name credited on the title screen, and you could even see the code on some of them, and I proudly included the link on my resume. Never brought up during the interview process, I was still expected to take the coding tests, and if I did a little poorly on one question I almost always got passed, even though the games I made had plenty of things going on, and some were even finalists in game contests (one hosted by Microsoft, even). I don't bother keeping up a portfolio anymore (I am working on a new personal site again, but not to put on my resume).

Hermel 5y ago
Maybe you should have applied with smaller companies that don’t have bureaucratic hiring processes yet?
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  Most small companies copy the bureaucratic hiring processes of the larger ones at this point.
  - bob1029 5y ago
    I'll never understand why business owners want to fail so badly. The principal advantage of small business is that you can happily ignore bureaucracy when it makes sense to. Some of our best employees are the ones who came in with the fewest credentials and the most to prove. There is no candidate I would refuse purely on the grounds of credentials. We are much more interested in side projects and work ethic than formal certifications or other pieces of expensive paper.
    - ivanbakel 5y ago
      >I'll never understand why business owners want to fail so badly. The principal advantage of small business is that you can happily ignore bureaucracy when it makes sense to. But how are you meant to know "when it makes sense to"? I imagine that lots of small businesses are run by owners who don't necessarily have the confidence to strike a new path in every facet of the business. If you're investing a lot of time and effort innovating on your product/service, it can also make sense to import a tried-and-tested hiring model wholesale from somewhere else. Of course, in a less generous sense that could be maligned as "cargo-culting", but if at the end of the day the planes show up (you make good-enough hires), you're not going waste time introspecting on the process.

jdenning 5y ago

Definitely. I use a link shortener to track visits to my portfolio links. (Almost) Nobody looks at your public work.

ornornor 5y ago
Same experience here. Everyone says you should spend your nights and weekends building a portfolio on top of your day job, but no one looks at it when you apply. And then you get put aside because you didn’t know for sure in an instant what is the result of `‘1’ + 1` in JavaScript.
thefr0g 5y ago
I mean why would someone want to visit your online portfolio if it looks like you didn't even put in enough effort to get a proper domain?
driverdan 5y ago
When possible I bypass shorteners so candidates won't know when I've looked, eg add + to the end of bit.ly links.

an_opabinia 5y ago

In my experience, for every engineering subordinate that turned out to be good that I didn't bother testing with leetcode, there were 19 who sucked and also failed their coding test, or sucked and we should have tested them. So far, among people who studied programming as their major in college, the best predictor was the prestige of the university they attended.

mattmanser 5y ago
If you've hired over 20 people, and 19 of them have been bad, it just sounds like there's something wrong with your process. It also sounds like you're hiring a lot of novices, which isn't what's being discussed really. The uni thing is not exactly a revelation. It's the same for every single field/job. Better uni, usually better worker. All you're actually saying is that novice programmers straight from uni mildly correlate in ability with SAT scores. Nothing surprising in that.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >If you've hired over 20 people, and 19 of them have been bad, it just sounds like there's something wrong with your process. I think this is part of the reason for the widespread usage of take home / coding assignments etc. If you have a bad process making people do some work improves your result. I remember the first company I had with a friend in the late 90s and our process sucked. It was embarrassing, although thinking about it we still had a 50% success rate in technical quality of people we hired. If we had given tests to the people we didn't have someone to vouch for it would have meant we did not make the mistakes we did. And by saying we had a bad process we had a bad firing process as well. The bad hires we made really were catastrophic because we couldn't handle any part of the process.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  Yes, the thing that is wrong with the process is that they didn't check to see if the person was able to write code.
BlissWaves 5y ago
I like leetcode as a hiring metric and I think it's the best measure to test out an engineer. Unless a company uses it basically to find people that implement the fastest algorithm(read: have memorized it already) in 30 minutes it can be a very very effective way of screening.

RandallBrown 5y ago

For a pure engineering role things like credits at large companies, online talks, side projects, etc. are all really great ways to get an interview. I can't really remember the last time I was turned down for an interview. You're totally right about the other part though. I've lost a lot of jobs I think I could have been great at because I'm really bad at whiteboard coding interviews.

kebman 5y ago
Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed continuous progress with several finished projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank sheet imp that they can mould wholly in their own image? Is real creativity and output really of no value to these guys?
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  > Or is it that they want a blank sheet imp that they can mould wholly in their own image? Is real creativity and output really of no value to these guys? That's what I'm starting to suspect, and that suspicion is shared by several of my friends in the industry.
- thewarrior 5y ago
  The book Disciplined Minds goes into some of this. It helps one understand the answers to questions like why companies prize things like performance on coding tests that don’t correlate very well to the job. Even FANGs are not looking for truly innovative engineers. Most of the innovation comes via acquisitions or when they hire some industry luminaries to lead projects. The rest are only there to fill in the lines and be highly productive coding machines that will learn the “syllabus” just like they learn to leet code. These deep technical skills don’t matter as much because a lot these highly paying companies don’t have work that is deeply technical. Their challenges are primarily around management and scaling the number of engineers. This requires reducing people down to something very simple and being able to treat engineers as fungible resources. Hiring and evaluating each person as a special snow flake is not the most profitable thing to do at large scales. This is exactly the thesis behind Paul Graham’s ideas on startups and innovation. The scaling of a large corporation inevitably jams up the gears of the system and a small team can completely outflank a large company with employees keeping more of the returns and the work being more fulfilling. Unfortunately the incumbents have sucked in most of the revenue so even though you regularly have small teams of people knocking out work that puts the biggies to shame making money is hard to impossible. So everyone on “Hacker news” is now left reverse engineering every detail of how big co works to get ahead .

lmilcin 5y ago

> In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I am interviewing a lot of people. I look very suspicious at these kinds of moves to try to impress me. I don't necessarily ignore, but I try to figure out if this is some kind of shallow engagement. It impresses me if you can stick to something meaningful and do it regularly for years but you can just as well hurt your chances if you propose 5 simple commits to random projects on Github to be your greatest accomplishment. A blog about programming is not going to impress me if you are still junior engineer. Rather, it is worrying. I always remind people to learn something first before you try to teach other people. I will still want to see you code yourself out of a paper bag.

teknofobi 5y ago
> I always remind people to learn something first before you try to teach other people. Teaching is one the greatest ways to learn and develop your relation and vocabulary for what you are currently learning. It’s one of the greatest tricks a good college class will pull, having students continually drag each other a step further as they learn something new and then have to explain it to their peers. Most blogging is this kind of “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”, so it’s seems to me you might be dismissing some eager learners if you think the act of blogging is self-important.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  > Teaching is one the greatest ways to learn and develop your relation and vocabulary for what you are currently learning Oh sure it is. I studied theoretical math and I found teaching other students math was great way to get it organized in my head. But we also had professor and I wasn't teaching anybody original ideas, just the material that was already written and defined. Now I have decades of development experience I still find explaining things to other people a very useful and efficient way to get my thoughts organized. I kinda exclude blogs with posts of the form "see, I have found something interesting today!" or "I just spent 5 hours solving this problem, writing down solution here so you don't have to waste time". This is fine. But if you have 3 years of experience in development and start writing blog posts criticizing OOP, that is definitely not going to help your case. I mean, it is highly unlikely you got enough experience and thinking done to even understand OOP, let alone start criticizing it.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

> if I forgot how to write binary search The binary search algorithm isn't something you can "forget". For a literate programmer it's like forgetting how to write the letter 'A' or forgetting which pedal is the gas and which is the brakes.

sedeki 5y ago
I think the overall point is the risk of forgetting something judged as "fundamental."
- Vvector 5y ago
  Can you clarify what you mean here? I would argue that any decent programmer could hack out a sorting routine, without having the code memorized. If you cannot write a binary search routine from scratch, how can you be expected to solve much bigger problems?
  - kragen 5y ago
    Sure, but there are a lot of subtle issues in both sorting and binary search. The simplest sorting routine is probably dumbsort: void dumbsort(int *p, int n) { for (int tmp, i = 1; i < n; i++) { if (p[i] < p[i-1]) tmp = p[i], p[i] = p[i-1], p[i-1] = tmp, i = 0; } } But it lives up to its name; I can't imagine any reason you should ever use this algorithm. It compiles to 16 instructions but it's O(N³). Insertion sort is more complicated—it compiles to 17 instructions—and is actually a reasonable thing to use in some circumstances: void isort(int *a, size_t n) { for (size_t i = 1; i < n; i++) { for (size_t j = i; j > 0; j--) { if (a[j-1] <= a[j]) break; int tmp = a[j]; a[j] = a[j-1]; a[j-1] = tmp; } } } That's because it has the lowest constant factor of all the O(N²) comparison sorts on common machines, so it's the absolute fastest way to sort small arrays. (On my laptop it sorts N items in 0.34 ns × N² ± 2%.) And it's also very fast for large arrays of nearly-sorted data, so it's a reasonable way to finish up after a rough quicksort. It took me about five minutes to write that, and it worked the first time I tested it. But that's in part because I find sort routines fascinating and I've been studying them, and programming in C, for almost 30 years. Even if it took you an hour or four hours and required a lot of debugging, you still might be a decent programmer. Especially for jobs where things are less well defined and you have to do a lot of debugging anyway! (By contrast, I've actually spent most of the last hour trying to write a properly working quicksort, the variant that finishes up with a single call to insertion sort, using both notes and a compiler. Of course it produces correct results because of the final insertion sort but it's not as efficient as it should be and I can't figure out why. Apparently I can't brain today... good thing I'm not in a job interview!)

sheikheddy 5y ago

What does ‘credits’ mean in this context?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

the_only_law 5y ago

Yeah I need to leave the industry. Problem is, not much else looks appealing. Most realistic pivots look more miserable and end up just being adjacent roles that remove all the parts of what I like about software development while becoming mostly what I don’t, likely with a much lower salary cap. I thought about doing something radical and going back to school, but I don’t have the time or money. Though this thread makes me want to look again.

whataremyvalues 5y ago

I've found careerexplorer.com to be a helpful tool for career planning and exploration. Knowing where I stand and what my values are also helps when it comes to navigating the professional environment.

jimbob45 5y ago

Where are you finding public speaking training? I’m asking because that’s a skill I would myself like to develop.