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0 pointsabeyer7y ago0 comments

> heavy on straight CS theory. “how do you sort an unordered binary tree in place“ kind of thing.

I was having a related conversation earlier, and feel like I'm reprising the same argument for a new audience, but... I don't see what is either Computer Science or theoretical about that. It seems like an eminently practical task: Handling things in a tree structure, sorting items, and doing work in-place to conserve resources are all very concrete, real-world aspects of writing software. You might not need them in _every_ case, but they aren't really "theory" in any real sense.

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scarface747y ago

If you’re a bog standard “dark matter developer” using high level languages or writing your typical SAAS app, you wouldn’t need it.

I turned down a job offer where the interviewer was more concerned about whether I could write a merge sort on the board (I did), than whether I could design a system. It told me a lot about the kind of people they hire.

I spent my first 12 years as a developer doing a lot of bit twiddling in C writing cross platform code with nothing but the standard library, but these days if someone asked me how to sort I would call a library function. Heck even C has a built in sort function.

abeyerOP7y ago

But those issues are all totally orthogonal to my point.

You can argue that someone doesn't need something, that it's the wrong level of abstraction, or that it's not an appropriate interview question. I even agree to some degree. But that still doesn't make those "CS theory" subjects.

the_clarence7y ago

If you are writing a webapp in PHP you need none of these things.

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