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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Why would I want to hire a candidate that paid thousands of dollars for Algorithms and Data Structures classes but didn't feel the need to pay attention? Don't you think that says something about the candidate?

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If I'm understanding 1_800_UNICORN's point correctly, it's more along the lines of 'any company that expects an experienced developer to recite academic details on algorithms'. Certainly my current knowledge of algorithms is very practical and I'm certain I've forgotten much of the academic stuff I learned 20 years ago. You remember that which is useful, forget that which is not (situational, of course) and when a company is looking for the latter, they're unrealistic or they want an academic programmer, which I'm not.

I've been out of college for 10 years, writing software professionally... it's so rare to have to calculate the big-O of an algorithm, or use a data structure much fancier than an array or a hash table, or implement my own search algorithm. And if I had to do any of those things, I would look it up and leverage this collaborative thing we've created called the internet.

So why should I be expected to regurgitate trivia at a whiteboard to get your job?

It's weird to me seeing statements like this because I don't work on any esoteric or fancy code, just frontend UIs, but I'm frequently making data structure and algorithm decisions.

Then ask questions about the UI framework the developer has experience in and ask about real problems faced with that framework for a complex UI.

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