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I have the opposite experience. My experience with junior engineers out of the modern CS education is that the current leetcode based system is impressive at ch

by melony 5y ago

I have the opposite experience. My experience with junior engineers out of the modern CS education is that the current leetcode based system is impressive at churning out a backend engineers who can write functional boilerplate code and algorithms. As long as you have a senior engineer supervising the overall architecture and doing code reviews for security issues, fresh grads are basically easy to replace cogs in the backend factory. Frontend on the other hand requires much more experienced candidates to deal with resource constrained systems, especially when it comes to animation heavy and fat client/WebAssembly apps where every frame counts.

TameAntelope 5y ago
Resource constraints? That is not something 90+/-9% of frontend developers need to care about. Backend devs will hit resources constraints a lot earlier than frontend devs will, anyway.
- melony 5y ago
  No? Server and cloud resources have almost zero marginal cost at most medium sized and above companies unless you are doing something truly intensive like video encoding. For most web apps, you can go a long way by just scaling horizontally and throwing more ram at the problem. On the hand, you don't have any control at all for the frontend, especially for consumer products.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    Ah, spoken like someone who hasn’t actually tried to solve a backend problem by throwing more hardware at it. :) It does not work, and is very expensive, jumping from tier to tier. Your memory leak will just keep leaking, your inefficient query will just keep gobbling up RAM, your unoptimized traversal will still take too long, until you find the actual issue and fix it. Modern web browsers have abstracted all of the resource management problems away from the app developer. The worst you can do is crash the browser, which is a pretty easy problem to avoid.
popularonion 5y ago
Leetcode algorithms for backend? I don’t think so, most backend devs should be experts in leveraging their team/project’s chosen DB infra. Which mostly comes down to designing a sane data model and selecting appropriate indexes. And in my experience it’s very hard to find people who can even do that well. Do you work in HFT? I consider that basically a subspecialty of systems programming.
- melony 5y ago
  > Do you work in HFT? I consider that basically a subspecialty of systems programming. Did you peek at my comment history? How did you figure that out? Not HFT, but trading systems yes.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    It is hard to think of another industry where someone's impression of daily-grind junior backend work is "leetcode" instead of "Why does this stupid json parser choke on floats that don't have any digits after the decimal!? Let's try a different one."

by melony 5y ago

TameAntelope 5y ago

Resource constraints? That is not something 90+/-9% of frontend developers need to care about. Backend devs will hit resources constraints a lot earlier than frontend devs will, anyway.

melony 5y ago
No? Server and cloud resources have almost zero marginal cost at most medium sized and above companies unless you are doing something truly intensive like video encoding. For most web apps, you can go a long way by just scaling horizontally and throwing more ram at the problem. On the hand, you don't have any control at all for the frontend, especially for consumer products.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Ah, spoken like someone who hasn’t actually tried to solve a backend problem by throwing more hardware at it. :) It does not work, and is very expensive, jumping from tier to tier. Your memory leak will just keep leaking, your inefficient query will just keep gobbling up RAM, your unoptimized traversal will still take too long, until you find the actual issue and fix it. Modern web browsers have abstracted all of the resource management problems away from the app developer. The worst you can do is crash the browser, which is a pretty easy problem to avoid.

popularonion 5y ago

Leetcode algorithms for backend? I don’t think so, most backend devs should be experts in leveraging their team/project’s chosen DB infra. Which mostly comes down to designing a sane data model and selecting appropriate indexes. And in my experience it’s very hard to find people who can even do that well. Do you work in HFT? I consider that basically a subspecialty of systems programming.

melony 5y ago
> Do you work in HFT? I consider that basically a subspecialty of systems programming. Did you peek at my comment history? How did you figure that out? Not HFT, but trading systems yes.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  It is hard to think of another industry where someone's impression of daily-grind junior backend work is "leetcode" instead of "Why does this stupid json parser choke on floats that don't have any digits after the decimal!? Let's try a different one."