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30 years into my career as a programmer, and I've never had to understand how any of these worked internally, not even once.
by marstall 3y ago
30 years into my career as a programmer, and I've never had to understand how any of these worked internally, not even once.
- ActionHank 3y agoWhen last did you go through a round of job interviews? The world seems crazy about algorithms as a must-know thing to get a job. Built large scale projects? Built production teams that can tackle any problem? Deeply understand the process of delivering value quickly without defects? Doesn't matter. Show me how you would do a binary search. Show me that you know the whole API for our weird stack. Show me that you know how to do a systems design on a white board of a webcrawler or twitter. Once you've done that you can do one-liner bug fixes on this legacy system that breaks routinely because we have no idea what we are doing.
- marstall 3y agoha yeah totally. things are out of whack. i did misspeak when i said "never" because there have been times when I have learned some of those algorithms for an upcoming job interview, which i always failed to get if they required that. i generally get jobs through people I know. going back to about 2009 every FT job I've gotten has been through that way, 3 or 4 jobs. So not much in the way of technical interviews, just kind of "we know you, welcome aboard."