remar

I'm curious to meet these devs that claim that even having a basic understanding of algorithms/data structures fundamentals is not worth their time. Something tells me that the work they do is more related to design/front end and as a consequence they've either never needed to use computer science fundamentals or have been able to get away with naive implementations due to working on trivial problems.

Usually I don't bother engaging in arguments with these people because I know that the standard algorithms interviews will weed these people out so that I never have to deal with them but I've started to notice a trend in more of these people finding their way into the "big 4" type companies and ending up on large scale/infrastructure projects where they end up making very critical mistakes, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13700452

I work at a "big 4" company that's also known for having difficult algorithms questions and I can confirm that sub-par developers still pass through. After talking to a lot of my friends in the industry, my theory is that most devs these days are basically just using sites like leetcode to train and memorize implementations of algorithms which end up being the same questions used by interviewers that use leetcode as a question bank.

I'm not against this type of training, I'm very familiar with and have competed in ACM ICPC, TopCoder, etc, but what I've noticed is that there seems to be a divide in the type of devs that are merely brute forcing and solving as many questions as possible in order to create their own solutions bank vs the ones who take a more structured approach of learning problem solving paradigms and algorithms/data structures in a way that enforces why they're used in the situations they are and how those can be adapted and composed to solve larger problems.

If you want horror stories... I've worked with a dev that didn't understand the concept of passing by value vs by reference. This was a person being paid 6 figures and has been writing code for cloud infrastructure with a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying memory model. I've also had devs that didn't even know that an abstract data type like a map could be implemented with either a hash table or self balancing search tree and therefore no idea of when you should/can/can't use one or the other. This type of thing wouldn't really bother me if I was talking to a front end dev, since I imagine most of what they do is solve design problems, but it's very worrying when these are people working on the lowest layer of a public cloud infrastructure...

Hey, just wanted to say I really appreciate all the in depth posts you put out on your site in hopes of educating others and helping them navigate the waters of distributed systems.

Curious, is there any single book you would say you've found to be the equivalent of say CLRS but for the fundamentals of distributed computing paradigms?

My current plan for deep diving into distributed systems theory has just been to go through resources like "Distributed systems for fun and profit", and aggregated lists/overviews like https://henryr.github.io/distributed-systems-readings/ and your distsys-class notes and then just DFS into certain topics from there - compared to the approach I've been taking with deep diving into OS and database theory which is just to go through text books like Operating System Concepts and Database System Concepts while applying the theory in side projects.

Hope I run into the same sort of luck eventually. Sucks having to worry about whether I'll still be in the country when trying to plan for the years to come.

All this on top of worrying about work, relationships, personal health, and always trying to catch up and learn the "fundamental" bits of knowledge required to do my job. Sometimes I feel like I wasn't born with as many cores as others :(

Curious, was the marriage specifically for the purpose of getting out of that rat race?

Question for HN: (sorry to piggy back off of this comment)

I've also gone down a similar path to what OP described and I feel like I really want to help those growing up in similar environments (e.g. 1st generation college students, poor family, lack of guidance growing up, etc) but I'm not sure where to start.

I live in the Seattle area and I've heard about TEALS as an initiative to mentor high school level students and prepare them for computer science in college, but I'm not sure if this would be the best place to focus my efforts (main concern being whether I'll just be mentoring kids at the more well off high schools vs the schools that really need it).

You can still use the old site for now https://sites.google.com/site/stevenhalim/

I highly recommend buying the "large print" version, it's the size of most textbooks.

The smaller version is nice for reading while on the go/during a commute but not as nice for when you want to have it on your desk as a reference while working through problems (which you'll be doing a lot with this book). With the small version I have to find things to weigh down both sides just to keep it open on my desk so I can glance at it.

I was taught that there should be tests against things like class constants so that you have a failing build in the event that someone changes a const that's part of the specification.

This was from some TDD course that my employer brought in where they emphasized that consts that are part of a specification or requirement should be tested against to prevent them from being accidentally changed or changed without full consideration of side effects/review against the program spec.

Is this what you're referring to?

Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say you feel disconnected from others when you get back? Do you mean in the sense that you feel their understanding of the world is limited compared to yours because you've seen/experienced more of it? Or in the sense that you had a different kind of fun/adventure that they'll never experience or know about?

Speaking from my experience as an intern at Microsoft, I really wish there was more focus on training. I've heard from a lot of praise about the quality of codelabs from friends at Google and never received anything like that when I was working. I was basically just given a project and expected to pick up things by asking people or reading some half-outdated sharepoint pages.

From speaking with other interns it seems their experiences varied entirely based on their teams. The impression I got was that it was really fragmented across teams and that each team felt like it had its own way of doing things.

I'm not exactly sure how it is at Google but I've heard from a friend that the entire company works on a single shared codebase. The project I was working on had 3 different forks of the framework I was developing (that I knew of), each maintained by different teams. Basically, the impression I got was that everything just felt really fragmented and that I was only working with my team rather than with an entire company.

I should mention that this was my 2nd software development job ever so maybe this is normal for lots of companies and that Google is one of the few companies doing it right, but the experience didn't really leave me with lots of confidence in the engineering environment/culture of the company.

I've heard tons of good things about the engineering culture at Google so I'm considering if I should try applying there.