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.


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list