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I think it's the opposite. I don't know many (or frankly, I only knew 1)people who has has the high quality code lying around which is worth showing. Most of t

I think it's the opposite. I don't know many (or frankly, I only knew 1)people who has has the high quality code lying around which is worth showing. Most of the people(including myself) I knew only writes professional code for the job itself. We don't hate the job. On contrary, we love it. But we don't write much outside the job itself, maybe for some random exploratory stuff occasionally but that's about it. But it's definitely not a reflection of the quality or the real job. At least the usual algorithm fundamentals are a predictable and fine metric, and you only need to learn once.

ThePadawan 5y ago
> At least the usual algorithm fundamentals are a predictable and fine metric, and you only need to learn once. Couldn't disagree more about the metric part - I know lots of people from college who basically saw CS as applied math, who I would say are geniuses at algorithms, but I would hate to work with (because being geniuses, their code is unreadable, their logic is inexplicable to anyone but them, and they are extremely easily sidetracked from the actual business problem at hand).
- flyingchipmann 5y ago
  It really depends on the company. I am not talking about the outliers which uses competitive level. From what I know majority of the companies test you about college level algorithm and data structures. And if you were an average student, you have already them covered. Reviewing what you have learnt is really not that hard. Compare to what's suggested. No I don't even write much code. What am I supposed to show?
- theamk 5y ago
  That's what the onboarding, code reviews, programming conventions etc.. are for. We've hired people like that, and while they require more initial tutoring that someone with 10+ years of programming experience, they pretty quickly understand what the "readable" code looks like, and start producing it. On the other hand, it is pretty easy to accidentally introduce O(n^2) complexity into the system, and that is not something you can explain quickly during the code review. (but maybe I am biased by my area, which has lots of data, tight timing requirements and non-trivial algorithms. Perhaps if you are working on web dev or GUI development your requirements are different? but then why do you ask about algorithms in the interview...)
  - ThePadawan 5y ago
    > (Perhaps if you are working on web dev or GUI development your requirements are different? but then why do you ask about algorithms in the interview...) That's the whole premise of this thread. Lots of people just think "well everyone else asks about algorithms, let's just ask about algorithms too". So candidates get to rotate trees. For web dev.

ThePadawan 5y ago

> At least the usual algorithm fundamentals are a predictable and fine metric, and you only need to learn once. Couldn't disagree more about the metric part - I know lots of people from college who basically saw CS as applied math, who I would say are geniuses at algorithms, but I would hate to work with (because being geniuses, their code is unreadable, their logic is inexplicable to anyone but them, and they are extremely easily sidetracked from the actual business problem at hand).

flyingchipmann 5y ago
It really depends on the company. I am not talking about the outliers which uses competitive level. From what I know majority of the companies test you about college level algorithm and data structures. And if you were an average student, you have already them covered. Reviewing what you have learnt is really not that hard. Compare to what's suggested. No I don't even write much code. What am I supposed to show?
theamk 5y ago
That's what the onboarding, code reviews, programming conventions etc.. are for. We've hired people like that, and while they require more initial tutoring that someone with 10+ years of programming experience, they pretty quickly understand what the "readable" code looks like, and start producing it. On the other hand, it is pretty easy to accidentally introduce O(n^2) complexity into the system, and that is not something you can explain quickly during the code review. (but maybe I am biased by my area, which has lots of data, tight timing requirements and non-trivial algorithms. Perhaps if you are working on web dev or GUI development your requirements are different? but then why do you ask about algorithms in the interview...)
- ThePadawan 5y ago
  > (Perhaps if you are working on web dev or GUI development your requirements are different? but then why do you ask about algorithms in the interview...) That's the whole premise of this thread. Lots of people just think "well everyone else asks about algorithms, let's just ask about algorithms too". So candidates get to rotate trees. For web dev.