7 ms·

The reality is that there's a shortage of highly qualified STEM majors. As an ECE student, if I were to ask students in my major to code a linked list, or bina

The reality is that there's a shortage of highly qualified STEM majors. As an ECE student, if I were to ask students in my major to code a linked list, or binary node tree, a good 25-50% would fail. And this is at a Top 10 program.

smileysteve 13y ago
There was a post this week about a Ruby on Rails contractor who helped with a talent search. He didn't recommend people that didn't know what Ruby Gems were or what Active Record was... They got hired anyway.
- agildehaus 13y ago
  I don't know Ruby, but I know what these things are from osmosis (running into them whilst searching for other things). If you don't know what Ruby Gems or Active Record are, you've likely not touched any web technology in depth.
- matwood 13y ago
  Amazing. Another reason to still ask 'senior' developers a fizzbuzz type question. Above is also the reason good (not great or rockstars) developers are in high demand and almost never on the open market. Once you work with people and vet yourself with other good developers, new jobs are usually just a phone call away.
  - logfromblammo 13y ago
    Again, it depends on where you live and who you know. Every job I have ever landed, I've had to go through the full HR rigamarole, from finding the posting through multiple rounds of interviews. I've never quite been able to make a friend--or even acquaintance--that has subsequently been able to backchannel me into a job. I've had several interviewers say directly that I appear to be one of the most technically qualified candidates they have, but after I walk out the door, I never hear another word from them again, not even to say they picked someone else. The hiring system is broken. And the damage is at least in a load-bearing member, if not the foundation itself. There is no financial pressure for anyone capable of fixing it to actually do so. And so we suffer as entities with far more political experience glide smoothly among the sharks, depressing our wages today, and tomorrow, they quietly dismantle the dreams of young people passionate about our field. It sickens me to the point that I feel like there are no good employers left in the U.S., in any field. I have no reason whatsoever to buy a house, befriend my neighbors, and invest in my local community, because at any moment my gracious employer (or their new owners) could decide to fire everyone and move out. That would leave me again in the position where I have to also move, just to find a job not quite as good as the one I just had. And now that I am in one of the few locales recognized as a "tech center" in the U.S., I find that most of the jobs here are military-industrial complex tax-leeching jobs, where industry best practices are routinely ignored, because the primary goal of the contractor is to produce billable hours instead of permanent solutions, and the overseer-boss got his job via military good-ol'boy networking rather than having one inkling of competence. What's the solution? I don't know. But making me retype my entire resume into your stupid web forms to better facilitate its automatic rejection for lack of required hidden keywords is completely antipodal to it.
giardini 13y ago
Coding one's own own data structures/routines for common data structures is probably suboptimizing. There are debugged modules available in most languages. Do students get an extra 10 points if they use a debugged tested solution from a library? e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6831231/should-programmers-use-stl-or-write-their-own-code http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6831231/should-programmer...
- jordanthoms 13y ago
  Yes, in production code you'd usually use a library implementation - although if you had specific requirements you would still need to build your own. That's beside the point though - any decent engineer should still understand how they work and be able to write a implementation of them fairly easily.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Coding one's own own data structures/routines for common data structures is probably suboptimizing. There are debugged modules available in most languages. But if you can't code common data structures on your own, you'll probably have trouble coding the more advanced data structure that you found a paper on describing (possibly described in part by replacing parts of a more common data structure) with some code, but not in your language of choice, that would be, from its description, far better than the common data structure for your problem, for which there is not a debugged library for your platform of choice.
  - doktrin 13y ago
    You're describing an edge case. While certainly true, it doesn't represent the current needs of the job market or the realities of the industry.
    - hajile 13y ago
      80/20 It's the edge cases that separate a good engineer from an average engineer. When that good engineer runs into that problem, he/she will solve it quickly and move on. An average engineer will spend days or weeks struggling with the solution -- costing lots of money and potentially delaying schedules.
doktrin 13y ago
I'm fairly certain their career prospects don't hinge on whether or not they can perform a few job interview parlor tricks. If I were to poll all my SE colleagues, present and former, and ask them when they last manually coded a linked list or b-tree - I can assure you the answer would not be "on a product we shipped".
- waps 13y ago
  B-trees with augmented information are very fast, and I know of no generic augmented B-tree. So I've contributed to a program that shipped a custom augmented b-tree. I assume the same goes for other types of augmented data structures. Is that so rare ? Or do most people simply not know how/why to augment data structures ?

smileysteve 13y ago

There was a post this week about a Ruby on Rails contractor who helped with a talent search. He didn't recommend people that didn't know what Ruby Gems were or what Active Record was... They got hired anyway.

agildehaus 13y ago
I don't know Ruby, but I know what these things are from osmosis (running into them whilst searching for other things). If you don't know what Ruby Gems or Active Record are, you've likely not touched any web technology in depth.
matwood 13y ago
Amazing. Another reason to still ask 'senior' developers a fizzbuzz type question. Above is also the reason good (not great or rockstars) developers are in high demand and almost never on the open market. Once you work with people and vet yourself with other good developers, new jobs are usually just a phone call away.
- logfromblammo 13y ago
  Again, it depends on where you live and who you know. Every job I have ever landed, I've had to go through the full HR rigamarole, from finding the posting through multiple rounds of interviews. I've never quite been able to make a friend--or even acquaintance--that has subsequently been able to backchannel me into a job. I've had several interviewers say directly that I appear to be one of the most technically qualified candidates they have, but after I walk out the door, I never hear another word from them again, not even to say they picked someone else. The hiring system is broken. And the damage is at least in a load-bearing member, if not the foundation itself. There is no financial pressure for anyone capable of fixing it to actually do so. And so we suffer as entities with far more political experience glide smoothly among the sharks, depressing our wages today, and tomorrow, they quietly dismantle the dreams of young people passionate about our field. It sickens me to the point that I feel like there are no good employers left in the U.S., in any field. I have no reason whatsoever to buy a house, befriend my neighbors, and invest in my local community, because at any moment my gracious employer (or their new owners) could decide to fire everyone and move out. That would leave me again in the position where I have to also move, just to find a job not quite as good as the one I just had. And now that I am in one of the few locales recognized as a "tech center" in the U.S., I find that most of the jobs here are military-industrial complex tax-leeching jobs, where industry best practices are routinely ignored, because the primary goal of the contractor is to produce billable hours instead of permanent solutions, and the overseer-boss got his job via military good-ol'boy networking rather than having one inkling of competence. What's the solution? I don't know. But making me retype my entire resume into your stupid web forms to better facilitate its automatic rejection for lack of required hidden keywords is completely antipodal to it.

giardini 13y ago

Coding one's own own data structures/routines for common data structures is probably suboptimizing. There are debugged modules available in most languages. Do students get an extra 10 points if they use a debugged tested solution from a library? e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6831231/should-programmers-use-stl-or-write-their-own-code http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6831231/should-programmer...

jordanthoms 13y ago
Yes, in production code you'd usually use a library implementation - although if you had specific requirements you would still need to build your own. That's beside the point though - any decent engineer should still understand how they work and be able to write a implementation of them fairly easily.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> Coding one's own own data structures/routines for common data structures is probably suboptimizing. There are debugged modules available in most languages. But if you can't code common data structures on your own, you'll probably have trouble coding the more advanced data structure that you found a paper on describing (possibly described in part by replacing parts of a more common data structure) with some code, but not in your language of choice, that would be, from its description, far better than the common data structure for your problem, for which there is not a debugged library for your platform of choice.
- doktrin 13y ago
  You're describing an edge case. While certainly true, it doesn't represent the current needs of the job market or the realities of the industry.
  - hajile 13y ago
    80/20 It's the edge cases that separate a good engineer from an average engineer. When that good engineer runs into that problem, he/she will solve it quickly and move on. An average engineer will spend days or weeks struggling with the solution -- costing lots of money and potentially delaying schedules.

doktrin 13y ago

I'm fairly certain their career prospects don't hinge on whether or not they can perform a few job interview parlor tricks. If I were to poll all my SE colleagues, present and former, and ask them when they last manually coded a linked list or b-tree - I can assure you the answer would not be "on a product we shipped".

waps 13y ago
B-trees with augmented information are very fast, and I know of no generic augmented B-tree. So I've contributed to a program that shipped a custom augmented b-tree. I assume the same goes for other types of augmented data structures. Is that so rare ? Or do most people simply not know how/why to augment data structures ?