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Slightly random anecdote. Had an intern one summer at a large tech company I worked for, who was determined to inject a red-black tree in to the project they w

Slightly random anecdote. Had an intern one summer at a large tech company I worked for, who was determined to inject a red-black tree in to the project they were working on for us, using hand-rolled code. I'm not sure what was going through his head at the time, whether he'd just learned how to write them at college, or if he just thought they were the pinnacle of engineering. None of the cases they were trying to shoe-horn them in to made sense. Places where you might debate that even a straight array would be sufficient, due to the limited number of items. The worst case of searching to the end of the array wouldn't matter. Doubly so given they weren't working on anything anywhere near a hot path, or a time sensitive operation. Standard library components would have been perfectly fine, and not carried the maintenance burden. They did, on at least a couple of occasions, smugly explain what a black-red tree was to their mentor, who had likely implemented their first red-black tree at college before that Intern had ever even touched a computer for the first time. He showed remarkable patience.

rdtsc 2y ago
> I'm not sure what was going through his head at the time, whether he'd just learned how to write them at college, or if he just thought they were the pinnacle of engineering. That's understandable and rather common with new fresh grads. They have the energy and motivation but may not quite have the experience. We were all there once, including me. My history professor from 8th grade used say: "There is a difference between knowing what you're doing and doing what you know".
saghm 2y ago
> I'm not sure what was going through his head at the time, whether he'd just learned how to write them at college, or if he just thought they were the pinnacle of engineering. I think it's easy to forget that a lot of interns might never have actually worked on a "real" codebase before; I know I certainly hadn't before my first internship! For someone who had only ever worked on homework code in classes before and maybe some side projects for fun, it's very easy to imagine that they honestly didn't understand that implementing the hardest data structure they knew by hand wouldn't actually be an impressive display of engineering to the company they were hoping to get a job offer from.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  I remember part of it being that they beat efficiency into your brain throughout most of early CS. In college, using the naive approach is treated as being ignorant. Then you work on real software and realize that computers are pretty fast and basic hashmaps & arrays will likely suffice for the size of the datasets you're working with, and beyond that, performance is more about tool/database choice than rolling your own algorithms.
- Twirrim 2y ago
  First code reviews are always interesting with interns, I love reading through them to learn stuff (I'm an operations focussed / sysadmin type, coding is more something I've picked up as I've gone along and wanted to automate stuff) This particular intern was dead set on this red-black tree, despite it being rejected constructively, repeatedly, every time they tried to introduce it, and despite mentoring on the subject from the experienced developer who was his mentor, and guidance from other engineers in the group. The only intern I every had to deal with who didn't seem to recognise that production code is different from academic code, where the balance on clever vs maintainable is vastly different :)

rdtsc 2y ago

> I'm not sure what was going through his head at the time, whether he'd just learned how to write them at college, or if he just thought they were the pinnacle of engineering. That's understandable and rather common with new fresh grads. They have the energy and motivation but may not quite have the experience. We were all there once, including me. My history professor from 8th grade used say: "There is a difference between knowing what you're doing and doing what you know".

saghm 2y ago

> I'm not sure what was going through his head at the time, whether he'd just learned how to write them at college, or if he just thought they were the pinnacle of engineering. I think it's easy to forget that a lot of interns might never have actually worked on a "real" codebase before; I know I certainly hadn't before my first internship! For someone who had only ever worked on homework code in classes before and maybe some side projects for fun, it's very easy to imagine that they honestly didn't understand that implementing the hardest data structure they knew by hand wouldn't actually be an impressive display of engineering to the company they were hoping to get a job offer from.

mywittyname 2y ago
I remember part of it being that they beat efficiency into your brain throughout most of early CS. In college, using the naive approach is treated as being ignorant. Then you work on real software and realize that computers are pretty fast and basic hashmaps & arrays will likely suffice for the size of the datasets you're working with, and beyond that, performance is more about tool/database choice than rolling your own algorithms.
Twirrim 2y ago
First code reviews are always interesting with interns, I love reading through them to learn stuff (I'm an operations focussed / sysadmin type, coding is more something I've picked up as I've gone along and wanted to automate stuff) This particular intern was dead set on this red-black tree, despite it being rejected constructively, repeatedly, every time they tried to introduce it, and despite mentoring on the subject from the experienced developer who was his mentor, and guidance from other engineers in the group. The only intern I every had to deal with who didn't seem to recognise that production code is different from academic code, where the balance on clever vs maintainable is vastly different :)