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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 recu

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".

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".