septimus111

I guess I like the Fields medal model better - it's awarded only to people younger than 40 to encourage future achievements.

I greatly admire the guy but does TBL OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS really need another award or title? All that money and publicity could be directed towards promising junior researchers who need it!

I'd like to try implementing a toy program that incorporates some planning. Any ideas of games that would be suitable for this?

Here in the UK the difference between London vs the rest of the country is insane: I would love to live somewhere with a better quality of life but it's much harder to find a good job outside London. I wonder how much of the resistance to setting up offices in smaller cities is due to senior managers and engineers not wanting to move away because of kids / partners, or because at their level of income they can pretty much afford anywhere.

How are companies supposed to evaluate candidates without giving them some form of busywork? The best way I can think of is to pay them to complete a project but that's not possible when you are interviewing loads of candidates.

I agree that these interviews are often just an annoying rite of passage, and they exclude many very talented programmers, but dismissing companies that use them as 'incompetent' seems like a stretch to me.

Learning basic data structures & algorithms is an immensely useful thing for a programmer, and completely essential in many cases. The best of these puzzles are based on problems which people have had to solve in the real world. For the companies, there are many benefits to conducting algorithms interviews:

- setting a minimum standard to make sure there is a shared language and knowledge that you can expect any engineer in company to know.

- making sure you are able to do more than trivial optimisation and go beyond the abstractions that libraries / frameworks provide

- giving you a simple problem to solve in 30 minutes to see if you can program at all.

Good suggestion, but it still wouldn't prevent beginners from just learning the 0.3f notation as an idiom and skipping the explanation. The trouble with floats is that understanding them depends on knowledge of binary, scientific notation, etc. It's a lot for someone who is only just getting to grips with how a program works.

The same thing is true with other categories of stuff. I was surprised to learn a few years ago that 'old' clothes and shoes can last 20 years and in some cases longer.