5 ms·

Graphs and recursion are fundamental CS concepts, a candidate that doesn't understand them would be a pretty bad fit for a lot of software engineering jobs.

batshit_beaver 2y ago
Citation needed. We don't even know what defines a "good engineer" come yearly performance review time, but claiming that it's the knowledge of graphs and recursion seems rather suspect. Inb4 "obviously there's so much more to being a great engineer," but then why are we not testing for that iceberg, instead just scratching the surface of "CS fundamentals?" And in fact, how many times does a great engineer need to prove that they understand fundamentals? Forcing engineers to go through that every time they want to switch jobs is inefficient and, frankly, disrespectful.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > X and Y are fundamental CS concepts In 2024, the list of X and Y are fucking HUGE. I would like to see OP sweat in an interview on some "fundamental CS concepts" they have not used in the last 5-10 years. The lack of humility in some of these comment is simply stunning. I worked with a guy who was absolutely a first class engineer. Very well paid; I guess about 300K USD. He had almost no experience in C++ for more than 20 years (mostly Java and C# for last 10 years). During a discussion, I mentioned that the original C++ std::map used a red-black tree. He was well-surprised that lookup was not O(1); instead: O(log2(n)). (My point: He knows about red-black trees, but was surprised the original C++ foundation library did not include a hash map with O(1) lookup!) Really: He would have failed an interview from this person based upon "fundamental CS concepts". Any software engineer, no matter how smart or experienced, has some weak spots in their fundamentals.
  - valicord 2y ago
    This is a strawman. Implementation details of a specific language library are not "fundamental CS concepts", unlike the specific topics I was talking about. If you're hiring a C++ expert, then yes, not knowing the difference between map and unordered_map would likely be a disqualifying condition. We are not talking about C++ expert interview though.
- valicord 2y ago
  > why are we not testing for that iceberg, instead just scratching the surface Typical interview loop includes more than 1 question. > how many times does a great engineer need to prove that they understand fundamentals? This is a logical fallacy. The interviewer doesn't know if the interviewee is a great engineer or not, that's the whole point of doing an interview in the first place.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    > Typical interview loop includes more than 1 question. In my interview experiences, programming problems are "fail fast". If you fail one, you fail the whole interview. There is no "round 2".
dakiol 2y ago
They would be a bad fit for a few software engineering jobs. I don’t deny that those concepts are fundamental, but the vast majority of software engineering jobs out there are about: designing apis, calling apis, writing sql queries, fixing perf. issues, writing yaml config files, etc. You can spend years working for companies in which you would never touch the topic of graphs, for example. That doesn’t mean one doesn’t need to be aware of the concept of graphs in case you need to deal with them. Another story is whether you need to know from first principles (or from memory) how to traverse a graph in different ways. I think the most underrated skill is to know what you don’t know. To know your limits. I know that graphs exist and that they are useful in certain circumstances. I don’t know how to implement the associated algorithms. Same goes for almost any other important topic like virtual memory management , security, performance, etc.
- valicord 2y ago
  Do those majority of software engineer jobs never need to traverse a directory or process a complicated multi-layered JSON object?
  - dakiol 2y ago
    I actually did that last week (parse a json object from an http response). But I used a well known library for the language we use around here. I mean, I also rely on automatic GCs and compilers… and while I saw the theoretical side of such topics years ago in the university, I cannot implement a single algorithm related to them (because I don’t do that on daily basis)

batshit_beaver 2y ago

Citation needed. We don't even know what defines a "good engineer" come yearly performance review time, but claiming that it's the knowledge of graphs and recursion seems rather suspect. Inb4 "obviously there's so much more to being a great engineer," but then why are we not testing for that iceberg, instead just scratching the surface of "CS fundamentals?" And in fact, how many times does a great engineer need to prove that they understand fundamentals? Forcing engineers to go through that every time they want to switch jobs is inefficient and, frankly, disrespectful.

throwaway2037 2y ago
> X and Y are fundamental CS concepts In 2024, the list of X and Y are fucking HUGE. I would like to see OP sweat in an interview on some "fundamental CS concepts" they have not used in the last 5-10 years. The lack of humility in some of these comment is simply stunning. I worked with a guy who was absolutely a first class engineer. Very well paid; I guess about 300K USD. He had almost no experience in C++ for more than 20 years (mostly Java and C# for last 10 years). During a discussion, I mentioned that the original C++ std::map used a red-black tree. He was well-surprised that lookup was not O(1); instead: O(log2(n)). (My point: He knows about red-black trees, but was surprised the original C++ foundation library did not include a hash map with O(1) lookup!) Really: He would have failed an interview from this person based upon "fundamental CS concepts". Any software engineer, no matter how smart or experienced, has some weak spots in their fundamentals.
- valicord 2y ago
  This is a strawman. Implementation details of a specific language library are not "fundamental CS concepts", unlike the specific topics I was talking about. If you're hiring a C++ expert, then yes, not knowing the difference between map and unordered_map would likely be a disqualifying condition. We are not talking about C++ expert interview though.
valicord 2y ago
> why are we not testing for that iceberg, instead just scratching the surface Typical interview loop includes more than 1 question. > how many times does a great engineer need to prove that they understand fundamentals? This is a logical fallacy. The interviewer doesn't know if the interviewee is a great engineer or not, that's the whole point of doing an interview in the first place.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > Typical interview loop includes more than 1 question. In my interview experiences, programming problems are "fail fast". If you fail one, you fail the whole interview. There is no "round 2".

dakiol 2y ago

They would be a bad fit for a few software engineering jobs. I don’t deny that those concepts are fundamental, but the vast majority of software engineering jobs out there are about: designing apis, calling apis, writing sql queries, fixing perf. issues, writing yaml config files, etc. You can spend years working for companies in which you would never touch the topic of graphs, for example. That doesn’t mean one doesn’t need to be aware of the concept of graphs in case you need to deal with them. Another story is whether you need to know from first principles (or from memory) how to traverse a graph in different ways. I think the most underrated skill is to know what you don’t know. To know your limits. I know that graphs exist and that they are useful in certain circumstances. I don’t know how to implement the associated algorithms. Same goes for almost any other important topic like virtual memory management , security, performance, etc.

valicord 2y ago
Do those majority of software engineer jobs never need to traverse a directory or process a complicated multi-layered JSON object?
- dakiol 2y ago
  I actually did that last week (parse a json object from an http response). But I used a well known library for the language we use around here. I mean, I also rely on automatic GCs and compilers… and while I saw the theoretical side of such topics years ago in the university, I cannot implement a single algorithm related to them (because I don’t do that on daily basis)