Comment by chavesn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chavesn | Hacker News Reader

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This idea that you have repeated several times...

> A front-end developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript will never EVER need to know how to write an algorithm.

> In my 12 years as a developer thus far I have never needed to ... write an algorithm to markup some HTML

> A developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript does not need to know algorithms whatsoever.

> Only a developer working with data or writing an algorithm to sort it should need to know that stuff.

This is either a spectacularly narrow view of what an algorithm is or it is totally wrong.

I've done both front-end and back-end/data for years. I frequently write "algorithms" on the front-end. Several of these were recent:

- Retry method for AJAX form submission

- Distribute assorted icons evenly among primary keys in a table.

- Dependency chain to check and execute asynchronously fetched scripts in the right order

- Even CSS can be somewhat algorithmic, as when I optimized by about 100X the hiding and showing of a huge amount of table rows with cascading style rules instead of JS

I don't think I need to go on, but the point is that if you think front-end developers don't need algorithms, then you are doing something wrong. I would check your assumptions about whether hiring for this is actually helpful. The companies you are talking about are leaders in both front-end and back-end technology. How do you think that came to be?

You know the saying, "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"? I think the corollary to that is "If you don't have a hammer, nothing looks like a nail".

If you have little knowledge of graph theory, algorithms, and other such "esoteric nonsense", you wouldn't recognize situations where those will be helpful, which then reinforces your belief that algorithms are useless. I have seen too many times a person saying that algorithms are useless, who then gets stuck wondering why his naive O(n!) program is running so slow.

This so much. I don't get how people can think that something so simply and straightforward as the time complexity of an algorithm is something superfluous that only belongs to some boring classes they took in university, and it has nothing to do with "real world problems".

Those people complaining about Google caring so much about their engineers being able to deal with basic algorithmic, instead, should wonder why every Google service is so fast.

> Those people complaining about Google caring so much about their engineers being able to deal with basic algorithmic, instead, should wonder why every Google service is so fast.

I imagine it has little to do with algorithms and everything to do with infrastructure. Most Google services (and even outside of Google - most services, websites, mobile applications, etc) are simple store data/retrieve data services. When it comes down to the source, fast data access is thanks to the database, and very few developers develop database systems.

Data in the magnitude that Google, Amazon, and Facebook handle doesn't work in standard databases. They have to develop their own data stores to manage it. Check out AWS's offerings, there's a lot of special-purpose services there.

That's great, but we're talking about a very small fraction of engineers who write DB systems. I have used some of AWS's DB offerings, and I didn't have to write complex algorithms to do it.

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