OT: CS education gone wrong (Was: Re: TDD is BS?)
deadalnix
deadalnix at gmail.com
Fri Jun 21 23:35:51 PDT 2013
On Friday, 21 June 2013 at 21:33:43 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
> If there's any need to reach for documentation, the interviewer
> has failed. When interviewing we (at Facebook) ask problems
> that are likely to appear in a normal day's work, but for which
> the typical libraries don't help. (E.g. many libraries don't
> can't help with implementing unstable remove (see
> std.algorithm).)
>
Amongst other thing, I did a merge sort and a quicksort in my FB
interviews. It is fair to assume they can be found as libraries.
But overall the process is really accurate to assert what a dev
can do. Most question were technically challenging, but weren't
tricks or overly complicated and useless.
For the anecdote, my quicksort was buggy, but my interviewer
convinced me it wasn't - when later check (after the interview)
demonstrated is indeed was.
> Also it's fair to ask about implementing a stdlib function
> itself if the interview concerns some systems-level work; e.g.
> brute-force strstr() is fair game and I think any engineer
> should be able to lift it off the ground quickly (to my dismay,
> only a fraction can). Paradoxically use of stdlib functions may
> actually hurt; I've seen people who e.g. call strlen() in a
> loop in order to implement strstr()!
>
When i was doing interview, I used to ask people to program a
function that sort an array of integer. No constraint of
performance or anything, the good old 5 lines bubble sort would
have been accepted. Most can't.
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