OT: CS education gone wrong (Was: Re: TDD is BS?)

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2013-06-21 07:57, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> we got to ask HR to first
> administer a technical test before any interviews are arranged; test
> results are reviewed before deciding to interview the candidate

I done tests like that, they all suck. This is how it usually works:

You get a problem to solve. They say: "solve it anyway you want, using 
any language you want". You solve it farily quickly and straight 
forward. Then they say, "you are not allowed to use that function". 
Basically they're saying it's cheating. Then you remove that function 
and change the implementation accordingly. Then they say, "you are not 
allowed to use that other function". You change the code accordingly and 
this dance continues. Then you're thinking to yourself, "Am I supposed 
to reimplement the standard library?".

I would say, most times, it's almost irresponsible to _not_ use the 
standard library. A bunch of people, a lot smarter than I, have had a 
good 20 years or so to perfect and fine tune the standard library. Not a 
chance in hell that I'm going to beat that, on an interview, with code 
written on a whiteboard.

A side note. You're of curse not allowed to look at any documentation at 
all and you're not allowed to use a text editor. You write the code on a 
whiteboard, yes a _whiteboard_.

That's just so stupid. That's not how programming works in the real 
world. Why the hell do they think IDE's have built in, easy to 
read/find, documentation.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg