Oh man, I would never want to work in a company that believes my understanding of the internals of arrays, hash tables, trees, graphs, etc. matter. They clearly have the focus on some nonsense that helps not at all in performing the actual job of a programmer, which is implementing good enough things in a timely manner.
I would literally walk out on the interview if they started asking me nonsense like this.
The worst job I ever took I should've passed on immediately when they seriously asked me to write SQL on a piece of paper. I should've walked out at that very moment. I didn't have the sense to do that then, but now I do.
It's like the post from a few days ago about how bubblesort works - literally basically nobody needs to ever know that. What the average programmer needs to know is how to use the sort() -function of the language in question and that's it, whatever algorithm is behind it matters so incredibly rarely that you can basically say it's never.
My day job is designing and developing websites, but in my off time, I like to build all kinds of things, including Ruby gems, iPhone apps, and Alexa skills.
It really depends where you’re working. Companies like FB, Google, and Amazon need to test programmers on data structures because certain structures work better in certain situations, and when their software engineers know which tools to use to optimize a process to run in 5μs instead of 10μs... well, let’s just say for a company running tens or hundreds of thousands of servers, every microsecond saved means less servers the company needs running. And less servers = more $$$.
But for most startups or mid sized companies it’s way more important that developers know how to get shit up and running, and less important the actual code they write to get there.
The problem is a lot of smaller tech companies look up to companies like Google and try to copy they’re interview process because hey, it’s Google. And these companies never consider that just maybe an app with billions of users has a slightly different set of requirements than their app with 500 users.
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Oh man, I would never want to work in a company that believes my understanding of the internals of arrays, hash tables, trees, graphs, etc. matter. They clearly have the focus on some nonsense that helps not at all in performing the actual job of a programmer, which is implementing good enough things in a timely manner.
I would literally walk out on the interview if they started asking me nonsense like this.
The worst job I ever took I should've passed on immediately when they seriously asked me to write SQL on a piece of paper. I should've walked out at that very moment. I didn't have the sense to do that then, but now I do.
It's like the post from a few days ago about how bubblesort works - literally basically nobody needs to ever know that. What the average programmer needs to know is how to use the
sort()-function of the language in question and that's it, whatever algorithm is behind it matters so incredibly rarely that you can basically say it's never.It really depends where you’re working. Companies like FB, Google, and Amazon need to test programmers on data structures because certain structures work better in certain situations, and when their software engineers know which tools to use to optimize a process to run in 5μs instead of 10μs... well, let’s just say for a company running tens or hundreds of thousands of servers, every microsecond saved means less servers the company needs running. And less servers = more $$$.
But for most startups or mid sized companies it’s way more important that developers know how to get shit up and running, and less important the actual code they write to get there.
The problem is a lot of smaller tech companies look up to companies like Google and try to copy they’re interview process because hey, it’s Google. And these companies never consider that just maybe an app with billions of users has a slightly different set of requirements than their app with 500 users.