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0 pointssolipsism7y ago0 comments

This strikes me as an analogy that does not work in your favor.

To know how to make a novel cake (not a recipe you've memorized), you need to have a good understanding of how the different ingredients interact. You probably even have a good sense of why they're there.

Those seem like exactly the qualities you'd want to look for in a cake maker. Sure, they'll probably be going from recipes in their day to day job. But they'll be able to tweak them intelligently too.

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fiblye7y ago

Most tech companies aren't looking for people to reimplement a dozen new variations of quicksort everyday. I mean, some companies really do need people who have countless algorithms ready to go in the back of their mind and the ability to apply them to new and interesting situations all the time, just like some people do need bakers who never need to consult a recipe and can devise new cakes for important events on a whim.

But most restaurants are looking for someone who knows how to cook and use the tools in the kitchen. A chef who doesn't specialize in cakes will still probably be fine if you give them 5 minutes to look up a recipe and make one. In the same way, the overwhelming majority of tech job openings are in need of programmers with some degree of specialization and the ability to know how to look up what they don't know and the experience/knowledge to know how to put that info to use.

The state of programming interviews for the past few decades has been to find people who've memorized all the "recipes" of CS. Most of the jobs, though, are about using some Javascript flavor of the month library and making it work with some other popular library and writing a bunch of interface code. Someone on the team might have to write an implementation of breadth-first search in their toy language, in which case they look up "bfs" on wikipedia and just rewrite the algo given.

Companies are testing employees on how to make cakes when their job will be all about making burgers to order.

joshuamorton7y ago

But an algorithm or more generally algorithmic thinking is not a collection of rote memories. It's concepts that can be applied broadly. Much in the same way that I'd expect a pastry chef to be able to cook a 2 layer red velvet cake because they know that a red velvet cake is just chocolate, and a 2 later cake is just 2 one layer sheets with icing between. Someone who understands a relatively small set of fundamentals well will be able to perform as well or better than someone who spends weeks memorizing every cake in the dictionary.

LaserToy7y ago

I disagree. I don’t know based on what you are making claims, but based on my anecdotical experience knowing fundamentals help low level coders to pass interview but has little to do with performing well. Based on my experience (currently responsible for a huge chunk of a major gaming platform, with hundreds millions users), inflexibility, emotional immaturity, inability to think outside of the box, inability to listen and admit failures, lack of emphaty, not understanding basics of sales(to sell own ideas) are major things that contribute to a bad performance reviews. Our strongest engineers will not pass google interview without preparation (me included) and it is telling. Especially given the fact that we have higher profits per employee than google (we know what we are doing)

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Apocryphon7y ago

Maybe there’s a problem with which computer science is being taught if it’s so difficult for so many people to derive those solutions from fundamentals, and instead have to resort to brute force pattern memorization through Cracking the Coding Interview and Leetcoding.

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