3 ms·

I don't remember my education over-emphasized Big-O too much - I mostly started thinking about it when I was preparing to do interviews at the end of my undergr

I don't remember my education over-emphasized Big-O too much - I mostly started thinking about it when I was preparing to do interviews at the end of my undergrad education. I suspect there's been a back-and-forth between industry and schools where industry seeks to weed out very weak programmers (i.e. those who fail fizz-buzz, people who write accidentally exponential code) and schools seek to over-prepare against those easy checks. Real assessments of performance go far beyond the depth and breadth of expertise that most students get in undergrad - so it's a fools errand to try and junior engineers about concepts like that. Big-O has a lot of flaws but I get why it seems so useful to all the groups that use it.

dgb23 4y ago
Assessment of performance can be practiced and taught in the small. It’s really just about making decent estimates, testing and some profiling. There’s of course potential mastery here, specific knowledge and tooling, you can dig down almost indefinitely, but the basic motions can be taught with simple projects. You don’t need Google scale to encounter performance problems and potential improvements. I know this because I work on small scale things, and had to learn this kind of thing on the job. I can imagine a ton of educational projects that teach this. Complexity analysis and A&D are very useful when you need them, but they are just two of several tools.