5 ms·

I am a 63 year old developer, three of my close friends are also developers in their 60's. One works for Lockheed on 3D engines, one works for Cisco, they are b

I am a 63 year old developer, three of my close friends are also developers in their 60's. One works for Lockheed on 3D engines, one works for Cisco, they are both treated very well by their companies. Myself and another friend work for a startup. We both enjoy the startup culture, and now that kids are away for their own lives, we have the time needed by startups. I have run into crazy hiring practices, but I have learned that when they ask me to balance a binary tree that the job is not for me. I hope to never stop coding, I really enjoy it!

chalcolithic 5y ago
>when they ask me to balance a binary tree that the job is not for me. Could you please elaborate? I reject offers from the companies that never made me write any code during the hiring process for the fear of having incompetent coworkers.
- VLM 5y ago
  LOL its an incompetent manager detector, not an incompetent coworker filter. First of all it shows your future boss doesn't spec and doesn't care. From memory there are two solutions one has essentially zero memory cost but has a speed of O(nLogn) and the other has brutal O(n) memory cost and is about O(n) speed. Is memory so cheap for your application that you can double it for a mere log N speed improvement? Is N big enough of a number to matter? Its absolutely savage that in 2021 there's still companies hiring that can't pass Spolsky's hiring list from decades ago. A place that doesn't spec is a place that doesn't use source control, doesn't test before deployment, doesn't rationally schedule, its just a gang cowboys crashing it with no survivors. They don't spec, Run Away. Secondly it shows a dangerous level of NIH syndrome. Its almost but not quite as dumb as trying to roll your own crypto. If the job is writing a database or maybe a filesystem or a sorting standard library type code, it gets a free pass. Any other workplace, if you see an application for a database, use a database, or import a known good licensed library for DB or filesystem work. If you're interviewing for, maybe, a 3-d engine game dev position, its legit to talk about something like how the 80s were an era of rapid theoretical development in hidden line removal algorithms, because they were and its cool. But if the interviewer is like LOL no we're going to talk about how you'd write a tree balancer for a filesystem, that's so deep in the NIH I'd run away. That project is doomed. Third reason is its not terribly difficult to blast thru that algo the simple way where you traverse nodes and insert into a self balancing tree, or the memory expensive solution where you store into a temporary sorted array and then read out in a tricky fashion into a new tree (which is faster than one at a time because mumble something honestly who cares for 99% of jobs). Its probably about two to six screen fulls of Python. The real problem is its a cultural indicator of here's some flaming hoops to jump thru. The stereotype is we're a kinder gentler more civilized culture because we no longer abuse dolphins into jumping thru flaming hoops for our amusement, now that we're better people look at our halos as we abuse our fellow humans into jumping thru flaming hoops for our amusement. Just a workplace culture I'd run away from if I saw it. Forth reason is I've been around the block and when the interviewer knows what they're doing and what you'd be doing they tend to talk about that specifically. When they have no idea WTF either they or you would be doing, that's when they whip out "I'm bored lets fill time by having you implement Bresenham's line algo in STM32 assembly language for lulz". The problem isn't the algo, and the problem isn't learning the algo, its that the hiring process consists of people who have no idea what they're doing and no idea what you'd be doing, so working there would be hell on earth. You're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you, and they just told you they have no idea whats going on. Good luck there...

chalcolithic 5y ago

>when they ask me to balance a binary tree that the job is not for me. Could you please elaborate? I reject offers from the companies that never made me write any code during the hiring process for the fear of having incompetent coworkers.

VLM 5y ago
LOL its an incompetent manager detector, not an incompetent coworker filter. First of all it shows your future boss doesn't spec and doesn't care. From memory there are two solutions one has essentially zero memory cost but has a speed of O(nLogn) and the other has brutal O(n) memory cost and is about O(n) speed. Is memory so cheap for your application that you can double it for a mere log N speed improvement? Is N big enough of a number to matter? Its absolutely savage that in 2021 there's still companies hiring that can't pass Spolsky's hiring list from decades ago. A place that doesn't spec is a place that doesn't use source control, doesn't test before deployment, doesn't rationally schedule, its just a gang cowboys crashing it with no survivors. They don't spec, Run Away. Secondly it shows a dangerous level of NIH syndrome. Its almost but not quite as dumb as trying to roll your own crypto. If the job is writing a database or maybe a filesystem or a sorting standard library type code, it gets a free pass. Any other workplace, if you see an application for a database, use a database, or import a known good licensed library for DB or filesystem work. If you're interviewing for, maybe, a 3-d engine game dev position, its legit to talk about something like how the 80s were an era of rapid theoretical development in hidden line removal algorithms, because they were and its cool. But if the interviewer is like LOL no we're going to talk about how you'd write a tree balancer for a filesystem, that's so deep in the NIH I'd run away. That project is doomed. Third reason is its not terribly difficult to blast thru that algo the simple way where you traverse nodes and insert into a self balancing tree, or the memory expensive solution where you store into a temporary sorted array and then read out in a tricky fashion into a new tree (which is faster than one at a time because mumble something honestly who cares for 99% of jobs). Its probably about two to six screen fulls of Python. The real problem is its a cultural indicator of here's some flaming hoops to jump thru. The stereotype is we're a kinder gentler more civilized culture because we no longer abuse dolphins into jumping thru flaming hoops for our amusement, now that we're better people look at our halos as we abuse our fellow humans into jumping thru flaming hoops for our amusement. Just a workplace culture I'd run away from if I saw it. Forth reason is I've been around the block and when the interviewer knows what they're doing and what you'd be doing they tend to talk about that specifically. When they have no idea WTF either they or you would be doing, that's when they whip out "I'm bored lets fill time by having you implement Bresenham's line algo in STM32 assembly language for lulz". The problem isn't the algo, and the problem isn't learning the algo, its that the hiring process consists of people who have no idea what they're doing and no idea what you'd be doing, so working there would be hell on earth. You're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you, and they just told you they have no idea whats going on. Good luck there...