6 ms·

I've never written a sort from scratch since my college days, over 30 years ago. Also never had a job interview that asked me do to so, or any other coding ques

I've never written a sort from scratch since my college days, over 30 years ago. Also never had a job interview that asked me do to so, or any other coding questions. I'm planning more for retirement than a next job at this point, but I shake my head at what my younger colleagues need to go through these days for the opportunity to write JavaScript with IDEs that do most of the work for you.

simias 5y ago
I sometimes have to implement a sorting algorithm when I write bare metal code that doesn't have any sort of standard library available. Of course, being a 1337 hacker, I then resort to the state of the art bubble sort. Or maybe an insertion sort if I'm feeling fancy. But enough bragging.
- jt2190 5y ago
  OT: I wish I could relocate a blog post (on Microsoft’s site, I think) about a very a naive and “obviously wrong” sorting algorithm that a dev identified in their (Excel?) codebase. Turns out the code was naive because the vast majority of their users were sorting very small sets of data and the implementation actually performed much better in those circumstances.
  - jhck 5y ago
    Maybe it's this one? https://ericlippert.com/2020/03/27/new-grad-vs-senior-dev/ https://ericlippert.com/2020/03/27/new-grad-vs-senior-dev/
- bear8642 5y ago
  > I then resort to the state of the art bubble sort Remember reading Bentley's Programming Pearls and fairly sure that's what he starts Sorting section with a short implementation of
- JTbane 5y ago
  Funnily enough, if you're sorting small amounts of stuff it does not matter what algorithm you use. If fact your O(n log n) sorts are probably a lot slower on less than some millions of elements.
rubicon33 5y ago
I liken it to what lawyers go through with the bar here in CA. It's gatekeeping. Just like I don't think the CA bar should have a pass rate in the 20% range, I don't think coding interviews should ask riddles that are nearly impossible to solve on the fly unless you get lucky and memorized THAT riddle in your studying.
- taude 5y ago
  Is there a shortage of attorneys in California?
  - anoonmoose 5y ago
    many people including myself believe that availability of legal services is broadly lacking in the US. not necessarily a shortage of attorneys, but a shortage of attorneys that can do work for anything but top-quintile clients. artificially restricting who is and isn't allowed to perform certain jobs often has that sort of effect.
    - ghoward 5y ago
      Not GP, but I never thought of this side effect before. Thank you for making me aware of it!
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    attorneys multiply when left to their own devices, which is often bad for society.. (since like law enforcement and middle management, LOTS of new people every year want the job for all the wrong reasons) so California Bar limits the new attorneys, which both lessens the total number of attorneys, and also advantages the incumbents.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Except that lawyers have to pass the California bar once in order to get licensed; we SWEs have to pass the "bar" every time we look for a new job.
Consultant32452 5y ago
I had one interview where they asked me to write out some fairly complex SQL joins on a white board. This was for a Java dev gig, NOT a SQL admin gig. I decided to really lean into how awful it was by putting in notations for three different implementations (Oracle, MSSQ, and Postgres). I was subtly making fun of them but they didn't pick up on it. I got the offer and took it because I do contracting and had just unexpectedly gotten a contract canceled early, so I was unemployed and have a family. At the end of the 3 month contract they offered me a full time position and I declined.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  SQL I can do in my sleep. Still haven't ever needed to write sorts (other than ORDERY BY).
alxlaz 5y ago
Not all younger developers have to jump through those hoops. There are plenty of companies that don't do that kind of nonsense, because they're trying to hire good engineers, rather than, specifically, engineers -- good or bad, that'll get sorted out later -- who will happily sacrifice their spare time to figure out how to jump through the arbitrary hoops that their jobs entail. Holding this kind of bullshit interview isn't a bad idea if you're a megacorp with chaotic teams and fourteen levels of management hierarchy where people spend most of their time on infighting and career building. You need people who jump through hoops, because successfully delivering most projects in these environments is 10% difficult technical work (which the good engineers can handle, and you can typically hire enough of them via recommendations), 40% YAML-poking bullshit work, and -- optimistically -- 50% jumping through all sorts of technical and non-technical hoops, most of them self-inflicted. I navigated this kind of process successfully early in my career, and the only thing that made me more miserable than interviews like these was the work I got to do afterwards, after accepting the offers. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is probably just how these things are -- I'm now pretty convinced that the quality of the interview is (barring statistical accidents) highly correlated with the quality of the actual position.
- nowherebeen 5y ago
  > the only thing that made me more miserable than interviews like these was the work I got to do afterwards Can you give some examples?
  - alxlaz 5y ago
    It's very difficult, because making sense of the examples would require explaining all the convoluted decisions and corporate mechanisms behind them, and that would make it trivial to identify the companies in question. I can give one example, I guess, since it's been a long time, it's a very common scenario, and this is an internal thing, so anyone who can identify it is either already there (tequila's on me this evening, mate) or has worked there before (I'm still up for tequila). The buggiest component in one of the projects was the testing framework. It was a home-grown testing framework, incredibly slow (think "takes about 5 seconds to send a 20-character string over a 115200 UART line"), and it had a huge bug backlog. Virtually all bugs got closed with WONTFIX. The person who'd written that monstrosity had made it up the management line, and his minion was now in charge of the team that allegedly maintained it. Since all sorts of bullshit metrics like bug fixing rate and total number of bugs and whatnot came up during quarterly operational reviews, a low bug count was nice to have. And since no customer ever complained of a bug in the testing framework, for obvious reasons, all that was required to keep the bug count to zero was an understanding between these two guys that all bugs would just get closed. So you had to spend a few hours finding creative workarounds, since the two-line fix you'd come up with in five minutes would never get applied. And I mean creative. We had code that literally eschewed non-functional framework code by exploiting a race condition in its code in order to do RPC calls without going through the buggy framework code. Now imagine you have to do something like this for every single task you do and you have a pretty good idea about how it goes. I mean you technically spend 100% of the time doing what you're supposed to do, but only about 30% of it is actually what you're supposed to do, everything else is mostly fighting cargo cult practices, senior engineering ego, and management disinterest.
nicoburns 5y ago
> I've never written a sort from scratch since my college days, over 30 years ago I didn't study CS at college, and I've never needed to write a sort on the job, so I've only ever written sorts in job interviews! I think I worked out a basic bubble sort, and told them it probably wasn't the fastest way of doing it but that it'd do the job.
Demonsult 5y ago
I happened to have, by chance, practiced writing sort from scratch right before an interview where they asked me to do just that. Doing it correctly in just a few minutes gave me pretty high status. Higher than I deserve. The randomness cuts both ways.
neutronicus 5y ago
I do my own Graph algorithm implementations sometimes Especially when I'm not sure the Graph approach is the right one, it's easier than either 1. Getting the Boost.Graph in the source tree to actually compile 2. Dealing with the bureaucracy of getting some, other, Graph library requiring feats of compilation possible for mere mortals into the source tree This is, however, not something I do from memory - much like the ancestor comment I see the relevant skill as closer to recognizing positive-weight Shortest Path and knowing you want Dijkstra than being able to write Dijkstra without wifi

simias 5y ago

I sometimes have to implement a sorting algorithm when I write bare metal code that doesn't have any sort of standard library available. Of course, being a 1337 hacker, I then resort to the state of the art bubble sort. Or maybe an insertion sort if I'm feeling fancy. But enough bragging.

jt2190 5y ago
OT: I wish I could relocate a blog post (on Microsoft’s site, I think) about a very a naive and “obviously wrong” sorting algorithm that a dev identified in their (Excel?) codebase. Turns out the code was naive because the vast majority of their users were sorting very small sets of data and the implementation actually performed much better in those circumstances.
- jhck 5y ago
  Maybe it's this one? https://ericlippert.com/2020/03/27/new-grad-vs-senior-dev/ https://ericlippert.com/2020/03/27/new-grad-vs-senior-dev/
bear8642 5y ago
> I then resort to the state of the art bubble sort Remember reading Bentley's Programming Pearls and fairly sure that's what he starts Sorting section with a short implementation of
JTbane 5y ago
Funnily enough, if you're sorting small amounts of stuff it does not matter what algorithm you use. If fact your O(n log n) sorts are probably a lot slower on less than some millions of elements.

rubicon33 5y ago

I liken it to what lawyers go through with the bar here in CA. It's gatekeeping. Just like I don't think the CA bar should have a pass rate in the 20% range, I don't think coding interviews should ask riddles that are nearly impossible to solve on the fly unless you get lucky and memorized THAT riddle in your studying.

taude 5y ago
Is there a shortage of attorneys in California?
- anoonmoose 5y ago
  many people including myself believe that availability of legal services is broadly lacking in the US. not necessarily a shortage of attorneys, but a shortage of attorneys that can do work for anything but top-quintile clients. artificially restricting who is and isn't allowed to perform certain jobs often has that sort of effect.
  - ghoward 5y ago
    Not GP, but I never thought of this side effect before. Thank you for making me aware of it!
- mistrial9 5y ago
  attorneys multiply when left to their own devices, which is often bad for society.. (since like law enforcement and middle management, LOTS of new people every year want the job for all the wrong reasons) so California Bar limits the new attorneys, which both lessens the total number of attorneys, and also advantages the incumbents.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
Except that lawyers have to pass the California bar once in order to get licensed; we SWEs have to pass the "bar" every time we look for a new job.

Consultant32452 5y ago

I had one interview where they asked me to write out some fairly complex SQL joins on a white board. This was for a Java dev gig, NOT a SQL admin gig. I decided to really lean into how awful it was by putting in notations for three different implementations (Oracle, MSSQ, and Postgres). I was subtly making fun of them but they didn't pick up on it. I got the offer and took it because I do contracting and had just unexpectedly gotten a contract canceled early, so I was unemployed and have a family. At the end of the 3 month contract they offered me a full time position and I declined.

throwawayboise 5y ago
SQL I can do in my sleep. Still haven't ever needed to write sorts (other than ORDERY BY).

alxlaz 5y ago

Not all younger developers have to jump through those hoops. There are plenty of companies that don't do that kind of nonsense, because they're trying to hire good engineers, rather than, specifically, engineers -- good or bad, that'll get sorted out later -- who will happily sacrifice their spare time to figure out how to jump through the arbitrary hoops that their jobs entail. Holding this kind of bullshit interview isn't a bad idea if you're a megacorp with chaotic teams and fourteen levels of management hierarchy where people spend most of their time on infighting and career building. You need people who jump through hoops, because successfully delivering most projects in these environments is 10% difficult technical work (which the good engineers can handle, and you can typically hire enough of them via recommendations), 40% YAML-poking bullshit work, and -- optimistically -- 50% jumping through all sorts of technical and non-technical hoops, most of them self-inflicted. I navigated this kind of process successfully early in my career, and the only thing that made me more miserable than interviews like these was the work I got to do afterwards, after accepting the offers. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is probably just how these things are -- I'm now pretty convinced that the quality of the interview is (barring statistical accidents) highly correlated with the quality of the actual position.

nowherebeen 5y ago
> the only thing that made me more miserable than interviews like these was the work I got to do afterwards Can you give some examples?
- alxlaz 5y ago
  It's very difficult, because making sense of the examples would require explaining all the convoluted decisions and corporate mechanisms behind them, and that would make it trivial to identify the companies in question. I can give one example, I guess, since it's been a long time, it's a very common scenario, and this is an internal thing, so anyone who can identify it is either already there (tequila's on me this evening, mate) or has worked there before (I'm still up for tequila). The buggiest component in one of the projects was the testing framework. It was a home-grown testing framework, incredibly slow (think "takes about 5 seconds to send a 20-character string over a 115200 UART line"), and it had a huge bug backlog. Virtually all bugs got closed with WONTFIX. The person who'd written that monstrosity had made it up the management line, and his minion was now in charge of the team that allegedly maintained it. Since all sorts of bullshit metrics like bug fixing rate and total number of bugs and whatnot came up during quarterly operational reviews, a low bug count was nice to have. And since no customer ever complained of a bug in the testing framework, for obvious reasons, all that was required to keep the bug count to zero was an understanding between these two guys that all bugs would just get closed. So you had to spend a few hours finding creative workarounds, since the two-line fix you'd come up with in five minutes would never get applied. And I mean creative. We had code that literally eschewed non-functional framework code by exploiting a race condition in its code in order to do RPC calls without going through the buggy framework code. Now imagine you have to do something like this for every single task you do and you have a pretty good idea about how it goes. I mean you technically spend 100% of the time doing what you're supposed to do, but only about 30% of it is actually what you're supposed to do, everything else is mostly fighting cargo cult practices, senior engineering ego, and management disinterest.

nicoburns 5y ago

> I've never written a sort from scratch since my college days, over 30 years ago I didn't study CS at college, and I've never needed to write a sort on the job, so I've only ever written sorts in job interviews! I think I worked out a basic bubble sort, and told them it probably wasn't the fastest way of doing it but that it'd do the job.

Demonsult 5y ago

I happened to have, by chance, practiced writing sort from scratch right before an interview where they asked me to do just that. Doing it correctly in just a few minutes gave me pretty high status. Higher than I deserve. The randomness cuts both ways.

neutronicus 5y ago

I do my own Graph algorithm implementations sometimes Especially when I'm not sure the Graph approach is the right one, it's easier than either 1. Getting the Boost.Graph in the source tree to actually compile 2. Dealing with the bureaucracy of getting some, other, Graph library requiring feats of compilation possible for mere mortals into the source tree This is, however, not something I do from memory - much like the ancestor comment I see the relevant skill as closer to recognizing positive-weight Shortest Path and knowing you want Dijkstra than being able to write Dijkstra without wifi