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Comment by posharma | Hacker News Reader

If your question is specifically referring to the leetcode style coding interviews, this is exactly how Silicon Valley engineering careers work if you want to change jobs.

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Which is such a strange optimization. As an industry we should boycott leetcode style questions.

I wouldn't want to work with someone that doesn't have their fundamentals down. Most people spend at least 4 years studying CS, they should know their stuff.

Fortunately for all the productive engineers out there, solving leetcode reflects absolutely nothing about how much they know their fundamentals or “stuff.”

You'd be surprised.

Fifteen years of industry experience and a top uni Master’s and I can assure you leetcode doesn’t predict anything reliably.

It predicts how much time they spent solving leetcode, and biases towards recent graduates. If you’re hiring senior talent it’s mostly a wash and a waste of time. But it’s deep in valley culture so we’ll likely waste our time with it for another decade or so before we wise up.

I studied CS for 4 years and have used exactly none of it since leaving college. Our devs all help with hiring and agree as a 20-person team that academic "experience" means almost nothing unless you have no other job experience. How little academia prepares you for anything in real software engineering has become a cultural meme.

Did your CS degree cover algorithms and data structures? Did you learn Big O?

Algorithms? yes, basic algorithms and sorting and Big O, none of which I've needed in 10 years of professional and hobby dev work. But to say "well you learned data structures and you use hashmaps and arrays so obviously it helped" is a very strange defense of academia. I can also learn "datastructures" online in a few days of studying as a new dev, so that's not really a good defense of 4 years of study.

Disclaimer: Not who you are replying to.

For myself at least: absolutely yes. That's actually some of the first stuff they taught us. Would I want to be interviewed on whether I can implement a linked list from the top of my head in an arbitrary language and 100% correctly in a high stress interview situation? Absolutely not. (and a linked list in the end is something really really easy if you ask me)

Does that in any way relate to what I'm doing right now? A little! This will differ depending on who exactly you work for and in what role. It certainly helps to have learned this stuff. I can honestly say that it was fun seeing how regular expressions actually work, how you implement a parser for it etc. But then you learn as well (right there in university) that you better use a parser generator after just having defined the grammar instead of writing it yourself. How many jobs are out there that require you to write a grammar for something? To create a new language? Very very few. There's a market for "boring business software X" software developers.

Is it the most important thing I consider when hiring? Absolutely not. We also don't pay FAANG salaries where I work. Do I want capable software developers? Smart guys for sure. People that are curious, willing and able to learn, writing maintainable code. Guys that if I tell them that there's a hidden n^3 algorithm in what they just wrote and it _does_ matter for the (relatively small but large enough) volumes of data this will run on can look up/ask for what that means.

EDIT: interesting down votes. I hope someone will reply to explain. I certainly don't see why we can't have a civil discussion especially given that we seem to agree on it having been good to get a solid university education. FWIW I have a Master's in Computer Science. From a country that values non university education (Germany - where you can do vocational training to become a programmer. Just like you can become a master carpenter through that system).

Fully will back you up on this. One does not have to be a metallurgist to be the best welder. In fact, your metallurgist might get a bit too clever playing with alloys when they need to focus more on getting the weld clean.

It’s also really downplaying how much one can learn when they need it for an application - yes it’s true you have to know about something to go after learning it, but there’s nothing stopping someone picking up a book when they get stuck to learn about what they don’t yet know.

Much of a CS course is nice to have knowledge for many programmers, and can be plenty beneficial. But a CS degree is there to show you theory not teach you how to program - the amount of people with degrees that are very poor at even basic programming is not as low as you’d think.

I've learned over and over again that Big O is a nice theoretical model, but often doesn't translate. The famous case is std::list looking better than std::vector but almost always being worse, but I've seen plenty of others.

I work on a very large system, but spend far more time chasing down poor performance due to emergent behavior than I do worrying about Big O on some small piece.

You'd probably be surprised how many people you've worked with who are quite competent if not really great at what they do and have gaping holes in what you might consider fundamentals.

Well what you call fundamentals might not be correlated to getting things done in day to day programming.

Think you might be confusing me with the gp :)

Most people spend at least 4 years studying CS

Many of the best programmers I've worked with haven't.

I've spent over a decade in the field. I had two formal years of CS in university. The rest of my tertiary education was art and history.

Would I be a good CS researcher? No, not even close.

Am I a good software engineer? Damn straight I am.

Would I work with you? Sounds like we wouldn't be a good "culture fit."

You're welcome to, but don't expect to get jobs at any company folks have heard of.

I don't like it, but it's just the way it is now.

Forget names, don’t expect to get paid any number that look remotely appealing.

I've worked for some very big name companies that millions have heard of. I have only had to do a coding challenge once, and that was not for any of the big fish.

I imagine we operate in very different geographic regions of the USA.

But do they pay $400K+/yr? That’s the point.

I do. I used to reject recruiter's advances the moment they described the interview process as a leetcode-hazing ritual (my words, not theirs), but as I've become even more grumpy/depressed over the poor state of things I might take it step further and start wasting their time (interviewing and then running the interviewers in circles for a while).

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