Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

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go to the same dusty corner where so many other CS topics that are never used in practice lie already

I've been meaning to write a letter to the CS department of one UC school: What the hell are they teaching in CS nowadays? If presented with a situation where the user can create circular references, there's one UC school that produces graduates with high 3.8+ GPAs, virtually none of whom I've interviewed can give you an implementable description of how to detect circular references. As a general pattern, they also tend to say silly things, like that a null pointer member of a structure uses up no data. I can go on and on. It seems to me they are being taught by TAs who would also flub such points in an interview.

Detecting circular references is one of those "tricks" which end up being a bad interview question because you either know the trick or you don't.

GPAs are not normalized across universities. The higher the average GPA for the school's graduates, the more likely grade inflation is at work.

How is being able to detect circular references a useful skill?

> How is being able to detect circular references a useful skill?

For all kinds of systems, where there are references input by users as data, one needs to be able to contend with this. Systems which crawl webpages have to contend with this. Parser-transformation systems need to detect these. Such detection could be useful in memory management. It's not just the ability to detect a circular reference. It's the ability to contend with problems of that type.

Furthermore, two of those UC system CS grads had eerily similar responses, consisting of, "Oh, is that a graph algorithm?" plus a literal handwave. Is there some pool of TAs somewhere that has that attitude towards graph algorithms?

Hmm, this seems like a kind of understandable attitude if I'm reading it correctly. Hearing that it's a (standard) graph algorithm means it's a solved problem so you don't need to worry about it: pick up a text book or Google and compare the available options—easy.

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