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It's really startling (as a mostly self-taught software engineer, with a bachelor's in history and a minor in Computer Science) how few people with computer sci

by douche 12y ago

It's really startling (as a mostly self-taught software engineer, with a bachelor's in history and a minor in Computer Science) how few people with computer science degrees are actually capable to code anything that would compile and run correctly. I've interviewed software engineering applicants that couldn't figure out how to implement a recursive fibonacci number generator... And regretfully, we hired one of them, and in two years, he has progressed so little in skill that I've reached the point of just trying to shunt him into work that doesn't matter, since experience has shown that he takes weeks to produce broken, badly performant code, that I can fix/implement from scratch in a couple of hours and a handful of google searches.

philwelch 12y ago
And even that is a level of quality below what some more demanding employers will ask for. In my experience interviewing, if you implement a recursive fibonacci number generator, you better memoize it because the recursive fibonacci by itself is one of the worst algorithms. I favor the iterative (and also, that question is such a cliche I haven't ever actually seen it seriously asked).
- douche 12y ago
  And that's precisely why I asked it... If you can't recall one of the cliched, stock examples that is always trotted out to explain the concept of recursion, then I have to flip on the bozo bit.
  - cableshaft 12y ago
    And why would I want to store in my head a terrible solution to a problem that I'm literally only had to think about once every eight years or so in a random interview and the first time I was taught it 14 years ago in college? It's something I've never had to use at work, and I've put together dozens of full applications over the years. That being said, I could probably still come up with it, but I encounter this problem when I interview sometimes. People will ask me to recall something we covered for ten minutes back in college that I've never used since and could easily Google in five minutes if I ever did need to use it, and then they go... "ooooh, he must not be very good..." when I can't instantly spout out the solution from memory in thirty seconds, and might not be able to picture it clearly in my head without writing it out or spending a few minutes thinking about it, possibly even writing some quick code to see what happens, like I get to do whenever I'm actually working and on the job. Most recently I got that with a combinatorial function (write a function to come up with all possible combinations for blah). I was having a hard time picturing how it would show every combination in my head, including in a jumbled order. I could figure it out if I could hack away at the code for an hour, and I remembered going over it briefly in college, but I've never needed to do it in my personal or professional projects since, and so it wasn't fresh in my head. The feedback I got was they were passing on me because I got that one question wrong. I'm perfectly competent and could easily handle the job, but because I didn't study every possible algorithmic and non-algorithmic question I could possibly be asked in the three days notice I had before the interview, tough. I'm more a fan of seeing the results of people's work than asking them trivia over a field whose sphere of knowledge keeps doubling every five years that they can't possibly store every single thing in their heads at all times.

by douche 12y ago

philwelch 12y ago

And even that is a level of quality below what some more demanding employers will ask for. In my experience interviewing, if you implement a recursive fibonacci number generator, you better memoize it because the recursive fibonacci by itself is one of the worst algorithms. I favor the iterative (and also, that question is such a cliche I haven't ever actually seen it seriously asked).

douche 12y ago
And that's precisely why I asked it... If you can't recall one of the cliched, stock examples that is always trotted out to explain the concept of recursion, then I have to flip on the bozo bit.
- cableshaft 12y ago
  And why would I want to store in my head a terrible solution to a problem that I'm literally only had to think about once every eight years or so in a random interview and the first time I was taught it 14 years ago in college? It's something I've never had to use at work, and I've put together dozens of full applications over the years. That being said, I could probably still come up with it, but I encounter this problem when I interview sometimes. People will ask me to recall something we covered for ten minutes back in college that I've never used since and could easily Google in five minutes if I ever did need to use it, and then they go... "ooooh, he must not be very good..." when I can't instantly spout out the solution from memory in thirty seconds, and might not be able to picture it clearly in my head without writing it out or spending a few minutes thinking about it, possibly even writing some quick code to see what happens, like I get to do whenever I'm actually working and on the job. Most recently I got that with a combinatorial function (write a function to come up with all possible combinations for blah). I was having a hard time picturing how it would show every combination in my head, including in a jumbled order. I could figure it out if I could hack away at the code for an hour, and I remembered going over it briefly in college, but I've never needed to do it in my personal or professional projects since, and so it wasn't fresh in my head. The feedback I got was they were passing on me because I got that one question wrong. I'm perfectly competent and could easily handle the job, but because I didn't study every possible algorithmic and non-algorithmic question I could possibly be asked in the three days notice I had before the interview, tough. I'm more a fan of seeing the results of people's work than asking them trivia over a field whose sphere of knowledge keeps doubling every five years that they can't possibly store every single thing in their heads at all times.