[HN Gopher] A computer science study plan to become a software e...
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A computer science study plan to become a software engineer
Author : sturza
Score : 195 points
Date : 2020-12-16 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| kylestlb wrote:
| Was there a similar flurry of "how to ace the finance interview"
| in the 80s and 90s when everyone wanted to be a stock broker?
| stakkur wrote:
| I would say that's definitely a study plan for learning key CS
| concepts, but not necessarily a plan for becoming a software
| engineer. Those are two very different things.
| ericmcer wrote:
| I have been looking for work recently (frontend/full-stack) and
| have been pleasantly surprised, all my interviews so far have
| been fairly practical React, JS, CSS questions. I spent a month
| leetcoding and reading Cracking the Coding Interview also. 8
| months of focused work on interviewing seems... insane haha.
|
| That said I do feel smarter for having refreshed my knowledge on
| BST, linked-lists, etc. I don't know if there is a better way to
| interview, the algo/data-structure stuff will definitely reveal
| your ability to stay calm and problem solve though. A tricky tree
| or graph problem will also reveal how strong your mental context
| and ability to visualize code in your head is.
| sxp wrote:
| Spoiler alert: https://medium.com/@googleyasheck/i-didnt-get-
| hired-here-s-w...
|
| > Last week I received a rejection email from the recruiter, and
| at first, I thought it was a mistake, and laughed it off. I
| checked in with my referral and he inquired into it and lobbied
| on my behalf, but in the end, it didn't change the situation....
| The thing that bothers me is that I didn't even get a phone
| screen. I didn't even talk to a recruiter over the phone. After
| all this work and enthusiasm, I didn't even get a chance to prove
| myself.... After speaking with some folks related to Google, the
| best I can determine is that they decided to pass because there
| wasn't a good fit on any teams where I might be qualified. This
| is in agreement with the rejection email I received -- there were
| no roles fitting my experience and background.
|
| > I've been hired as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon!
|
| Assuming you can get to the actual interview stage, the fastest
| option is to prepare by just grinding leetcode to maximize your
| chances of passing the interview. That won't help with aspects
| like the system design or behavioral interviews, but grinding
| leetcode will give you a better chance of passing the coding
| interview compared to studying CS theory.
| pksebben wrote:
| I hate to nitpick, but your use of 'spoiler alert' here made me
| believe there might be some clever deception in the article,
| but he got hired at Amazon _after_ the Google rejection. this
| is slightly misleading.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| It's a little frustrating how random the process is. I'd
| consider myself to have a decent resume for an undergraduate.
| I've interned at a "big N" so to speak, I've done side projects
| that are relevant in my field of interest and I'd consider
| myself to have amassed some domain specific knowledge. Yet my
| resume gets random rejected/ghosted from a remarkable amount of
| places. It's especially bad when I don't fit neatly into a
| category for recruiting. So many places wouldn't hire me
| because apparently "I want to work during COVID cause online
| school sucks" is too confusing.
| Mattish wrote:
| > ...This is meant for new software engineers...
|
| Do these big companies really need so many developers that only
| know how to use this long list of 'fundamentals'?
|
| I've interviewed a lot of people of all ranges, ages and skews.
| No matter what, when it comes down to sitting down with them and
| asking them to write out a simple program without any
| technicalities, 9/10 of them fail due to clearly not spending
| enough time just making things.
|
| Are these big companies _really_ hiring juniors with this as
| their laundry list?
|
| > ...Write code on a whiteboard or paper, not a computer. Test
| with some sample inputs. Then test it out on a computer....
|
| A junior to me who has spent a year banging away making real
| failing programs and can talk about what and where they struggled
| with is useful to me(and the company).
|
| A junior who hasn't built a single project, but can tell me about
| the one time they spent 4 months writing data structures on white
| boards is little more then a warm, but dead silent body in a
| design meeting.
| a_t48 wrote:
| I think the whiteboard advice is for being comfortable in
| interviews.
| nelsondev wrote:
| From scanning through the course outline, the big omission is
| learning about distributed systems, and industry leading
| implementations of common tools.
|
| At big tech companies, you typically have to work at a much
| larger scale. A solution that works, won't necessarily work at
| 10x, 100x, 1000x the scale. You often need to use technologies
| architected differently than a monolithic Web App.
|
| I would recommend learning more about the commonly used "tools"
| that a distributed systems engineer would use, more specifically:
|
| - Load balancer - Nginx
|
| - Key/Value storage - Redis
|
| - Pub/sub - Kafka
|
| - Queueing - SQS
|
| - Map/reduce - Hadoop, EMR
|
| - Databases - SQL
| ccajas wrote:
| There's a different "knowledge" problem that must be tackled
| here.
|
| Someone can form a cognitive bias from only being exposed to a
| few ways to solve a problem. Maybe it's because they haven't
| seen it to larger scale, or that they only worked with
| monoliths, and thus are limited to only that problem scope.
|
| Throwing more MySQL databases at a problem won't fix all
| problems, but for a lot of people, this is all they know. How
| do discover those unknown unknowns, to learn the applications
| of tools you haven't yet been made aware of?
| nelsondev wrote:
| As a software engineer, you have a professional
| responsibility to stay abreast of current technology. That
| doesn't mean hopping on every latest JS fad, but it does mean
| continually looking for more information, and learning how
| others in the field are solving problems.
|
| Physicians have to keep up their board
| certifications/licenses by undergoing yearly(?) retraining,
| in order to continue practicing medicine.
|
| It's not that hard to find what other software engineers are
| doing, to start, Read hacker news! Talk to more experienced
| engineers, read blogs, as an intellectual exercise, surf
| through AWS services and think about how you could use each.
| stevofolife wrote:
| No it's not. A formal computer science education at least
| mention and cover the problems these tools are solving. And
| for those who want to solve these challenges, they take
| graduate courses.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| These I expect a real software engineer to be able to learn
| pretty quickly.
| thrower wrote:
| I used something similar to this as well as Khan Academy to learn
| CS, when I transitioned into software engineering, after being
| laid off at my previous position in a different industry.
|
| It's possible, but it takes work. I also benefited by contacting
| my peers from college on LinkedIn and getting referrals for
| interviews. Even though I didn't major in STEM originally, I
| still ended up connecting/befriending many while in school. I
| would encourage you to try to utilize resources like that as much
| as you can.
| mrich wrote:
| The most important thing on your path to becoming a software
| engineer is building stuff, improving it, releasing it, and
| thinking how you can do it better. Having been through the
| lifecycle of a piece of software from design to maintenance will
| also provide a wealth of experience.
|
| I understand that it's popular to let people solve toy problems
| during interviews, and think that's ok for people coming out of
| university. However for more senior roles I would rather hand out
| a coding assignment. You can judge the experience of a developer
| much better by the way she/he chooses algorithms, considers
| corner cases, supportability etc.
| theptip wrote:
| I strongly agree with this point. Most of day-to-day problems
| in software engineering / craftsmanship (i.e. the work most
| people are paid for in this industry) are not computer science
| problems, they are about the process of understanding your user
| requirements, iteratively improving your product, achieving and
| maintaining the appropriate level of quality, and the meta-
| cognitive skills around identifying when you just need need to
| fix a bug vs. step back and look for a way to improve your
| tools.
|
| You will get some transitive learning of some of these things
| if you do lots of coding challenges, but I personally found a
| huge benefit in my formative years from building a single full-
| stack application over many months, much more than solving
| simpler day- or week-long standalone tasks.
| caymanjim wrote:
| This isn't a bad list of topics about data structures,
| algorithms, and software fundamentals, but let's not pretend that
| computer science has anything to do with most software
| engineering roles. I studied computer science, and in 30 years,
| I've hardly used any of it. There were a few jobs where some of
| the statistics and math were helpful, but in my long career, I've
| seen very little overlap between computer science and working as
| a software engineer. Google and other big tech companies use
| these criteria to filter people out at the hiring stage, but the
| vast majority of work has nothing to do with any of this stuff.
| stevofolife wrote:
| Your work doesn't depend on operating systems, databases,
| network communications and data structures? I can go on.
| oscargrouch wrote:
| Lets just pretend that this is working to filter good
| candidates.. even then good software have a lot to do with
| team work. Its better to have people who are experts in
| things that the product need to be good at, but also less
| expert in a certain field but that will do other parts of the
| product, than you have to manage the group work properly..
|
| My point being, you need people with a myriad of skill sets,
| and some of them don't even have to do with expert knowledge
| needed in some areas.
|
| Also you might have an expert in storage for instance that do
| poorly in certain tests giving he never needed to work with
| those kind of algorithms.
|
| So in the end the company ends with the same type, the same
| kind of person, and how can you make a great team that needs
| people with different skills doing distinct stuff, if you
| optimized your hiring to filter for one particular type?
| busterarm wrote:
| Not as much as it depends on human communications,
| organization, self-management, etc.
|
| Most technical challenges in my experience end up being
| reduced to word problems.
|
| All of the stuff you mentioned is probably 10% of it. You can
| be bad at the 10% if you're great at the 90%.
| stevofolife wrote:
| Word problem? That's not a technical challenge. That has to
| do with writing and communications, which are ubiquitous to
| all types of work.
|
| I think you're misunderstanding the premise here.
| busterarm wrote:
| I think you're mistaking work for being puzzle-solving.
|
| Work is always about people. If it's not about people,
| it's probably research, which is different from work.
| minkzilla wrote:
| Well good thing you learned to read, write, be disciplined
| and be organized in school along side CS.
| tmotwu wrote:
| Formalizing word problems and effectively transforming it
| to a program is inherently a complexity theory exercise.
| gumby wrote:
| > I studied computer science, and in 30 years, I've hardly used
| any of it. There were a few jobs where some of the statistics
| and math were helpful, but in my long career, I've seen very
| little overlap between computer science and working as a
| software engineer.
|
| I'm not challenging your experience, but I am replying to say
| that mine is the opposite. I certainly have used quite a bit of
| theory (over a little more than 30 years), not so much
| explicitly as to think about the problem I'm working on before
| starting to code, or in the process of discussion about some
| code with coworkers. Also has helped me look stuff up or learn
| new things.
|
| Perhaps you've used it more than you think, but merely
| subconsciously?
| olingern wrote:
| This on cue comment is quite trite, IMO.
|
| I went through school and did just okay in CS. 12 years later,
| I'm much more interested in topics within CS that felt like
| chores for my degree.
|
| In the context of getting a majority of job, yeah, it's not
| great. In the context of being a better programmer, I think
| it's worthwhile to understand the "pillars" on which you are
| building your "house."
|
| HN has an interesting dichotomy of love for all things CS and
| hate for anything that involves interviewing.
| jackallis wrote:
| i do really resent when people provide constructive-criticism
| laced just with criticism and nothing constructive.
| macksd wrote:
| My degree was actually called Information Technology and I will
| say that it has proved to be a really good degree for me. It
| was essentially a CS minor with some different classes on
| networking, security, system administration, hardware, project
| management, etc. I would say I'm better off career-wise because
| I did that instead of Computer Science. I was even almost not
| considered for a job because of it, and I turned out to be a
| really good fit for that job!
|
| That said, and admittedly I have gravitated to niches that
| might be more computer science-y niches at points in their hype
| cycles where lots of research was being applied, but I have
| occasionally wished I perhaps _also_ had a stronger academic
| basis in computer science. In distributed systems, people are
| still writing new schedulers, and I wish I had taken that
| operating systems class when you had to write one. I don 't
| always understand what my colleagues are talking about with
| some of the newer functional programming features popping up in
| languages. Stuff like that.
|
| I do agree there's a disconnect between what universities
| deliver and what people expect of them (paths into academic
| research vs. career preparation) and I think a Bachelor's
| degree is overhyped for that. But I do think you're
| understating the role of CS theory and fundamentals in high-
| level software engineering. Just because you don't use many of
| the lessons does not mean they haven't improved your ability to
| think, and the general base of knowledge on which you're able
| to build.
| vbtemp wrote:
| Your comment reflects a common meme that can often be
| summarized as: "Real World" work doesn't involve the academic
| nonsense you learn in school.
|
| Many of the people who say this kind of stuff never really
| mastered the theory, and because they never mastered it they
| can't really use it, and because they can't really use it they
| find work that doesn't strictly require it, and then conclude
| it's useless... It's like when otherwise successful people tell
| you all that calculus they learned in high school is useless,
| it's not useless, they just found success in a career that
| didn't need it.
|
| I resort to my textbooks and academic nonsense all the time.
| There are often two ways to solve a problem, the first is just
| code-until-it-works, the second often involves modeling it in
| some kind of formal structure, and defining the operations over
| that structure and their properties. Usually, in doing this,
| the resulting implementation is far less code and far more
| resilient. But those who are not comfortable with the
| foundational theory stuff just don't see it and don't even
| think to approach the problem in that way.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| CompSci theory hasn't helped me with the complexity of the
| industry i work in. It hasn't helped me when i've
| misunderstood something in our domain. It hasn't helped me
| release / distribute a product easier or faster or cheaper.
| It hasn't helped me navigate team dynamics or how to work
| effectively with others. It hasn't helped me write better
| technical texts.
|
| So for some very specific cases, in my career (and i suspect
| for many business application developers) set theory has been
| the most useful thing i learned in CompSci. How much of a
| real world day do i spend using that knowledge? 0.0something%
| on average.
|
| In fairness, It has sometimes helped me get a product
| finished sooner but this is tenuous at best because i can
| point to far greater influences from learning how to use
| specific tools that have helped me get to "done" sooner.
|
| The difference between real world developer and CompSci isn't
| necessarily in more effective use of CompSci.
| dkarl wrote:
| Maybe it's easy to overlook these things when you have a
| really deep computer science background, but coming to
| software engineering from a non-CS background (math degree)
| I found lots of valuable knowledge in CS. The most
| important parts for me would be:
|
| - State machines. I run into a lot of state machines,
| especially incompletely specified ones. Not that everybody
| gets these wrong if they haven't studied state machines in
| a textbook and worked the exercises at the end of the
| chapter, but recognizing "oh, this is a state machine"
| gives me a mental framework, a notation, a vocabulary that
| other developers understand, and a better ability to
| understand when a problem is underspecified or
| inconsistent.
|
| - Queueing theory and algorithmic complexity. These two
| usually come in handy from the perspective of spotting and
| avoiding stupid mistakes. It's true that people can do a
| pretty decent job from a handful of rules of thumb, but not
| everybody has that minimum knowledge, and sometimes a
| problem has a twist that an imprecise rule of thumb doesn't
| account for.
|
| - Distributed systems. Just understanding the solution of a
| few problems in depth, and knowing from that how hard
| simple things really are, is incredibly valuable. Without
| that background, people can naively tackle extremely
| complex problems, bash their heads against them for years,
| and still underestimate the difficulty of the problems
| they've created for themselves by orders of magnitude.
|
| In general, the rigor of doing theoretical problems, the
| discipline of actually proving things, creates habits that
| uncover lots of non-happy path possibilities.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I have a degree in math and physics. I used it exactly
| once, in one aspect on one job. It was down below
| 0.0something% - need one or three more zeroes...
|
| ... until I took a job in X-ray imaging. We were working on
| a surgical X-ray (C arm) that could pinch-hit as a CT
| machine. And suddenly everything was 3D coordinate
| transforms and fourier transforms, plus X-ray physics, up
| to my eyeballs.
|
| The theory stuff isn't useful... until it is. And when it
| is, it helps to have it.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| All this is true, but when I look at undergrad curricula
| for other engineering disciplines I don't see this stuff
| either. And the software engineering courses I did have in
| undergrad were _terrible_.
| vbtemp wrote:
| Software engineering needs to be learned on the job. I
| see lots of new grads that take classes in "Agile" and I
| cringe just knowing how instead they could be taking
| difficult courses in graph theory, theory of computation,
| abstract algebra, advanced algorithms, distributed
| systems, or any other number of advanced topics. As we
| get older it's easier to pick up tricks of the trade
| (various Git workflows, "agile", etc)... but it gets
| harder to sit down to do 3 hours of homework 4 days a
| week doing your pushdown automata or linear algebra
| exercises.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > but it gets harder to sit down to do 3 hours of
| homework 4 days a week doing your pushdown automata or
| linear algebra exercises.
|
| 38 year old studying astrodynamics for work. Can attest
| to the difficulty of this. No kids yet, that helps, but
| the wife and I are planning on starting a family soon so
| it'll get even harder with increased demands on my time.
| vbtemp wrote:
| It sounds like you work in an industry that doesn't
| strictly require frequently delving into foundational
| theory in CS. I do believe it would be a mistake to
| conclude its useless, however, as there are many other
| industries that do need it, and people who are not in touch
| with the theory probably would not be competitive in those
| industries.
| wolco2 wrote:
| From your prespective how common are those types of roles
| in all industries as a whole?
|
| There are interesting compiler roles but the vast
| majority who learn how to build a compiler never use it
| day to day work. Would you recommend spending more time
| building compilers to better compete for those few roles
| or would you recommend a different approach?
| VRay wrote:
| I work in firmware, and 99.9% of the time the most exotic
| data structure we touch is a linked list
|
| CS still comes in handy though, especially computer
| engineering to understand some of the workings of the
| hardware
|
| Occasionally I'll use real CS knowledge when I'm building
| tools for work or working on games in my free time.
|
| Full disclosure, I didn't actually study CS in school
| though.. I studied EE and then went and learned CS via
| Wikipedia when I needed it to find a better-paying coding
| job.
| necheffa wrote:
| I use most of my CS skills almost daily.
|
| I may not be writing compilers professionally, but on the
| surface, understanding parsing has gotten me out of more
| than a few tight corners. More abstractly, there are
| lessens to be learned in designing large applications;
| and appreciating the difference between a finite state
| machine and a deterministic turing machine, including the
| types of problems they can solve and how much of a pain
| in the ass one is to write compared to the other.
| vbtemp wrote:
| Challenges that benefit tremendously from just a bit of a
| dive into theory are all over the place. This has been
| true for me in my career as a software engineer whether
| I'm working at an energy company, federal research lab,
| tech startup, or networking services company. The key
| part is that it's not apparent (or apparently needed)
| unless you are familiar with the material.
| bcheung wrote:
| This is true for the most part. But having the CS knowledge
| allows you to create much more efficient solutions once at
| scale.
|
| I've personally revamped core parts of a product at
| previous companies to be over 1,000x more efficient just by
| applying some CS principles. This translates to $100K/mo+
| in savings for a company that is at scale.
| helloitsian wrote:
| I have to ask though... Was it at scale?
| bcheung wrote:
| I guess that's a relative term. But hosting bill was
| around $250K/mo from what I remember.
| bird_monster wrote:
| > and because they never mastered it they can't really use
| it, and because they can't really use it they find work that
| doesn't strictly require it, and then conclude it's
| useless...
|
| But isn't this statement too specific to apply to the
| generalization that you're disagreeing with? "Most 'real
| world' work doesn't require CompSci" is a generally true
| statement, because most "real world work" is incredibly
| mundane and repetitive.
|
| So, isn't your take kind of the inverse of what you're
| talking about? "I enjoyed ____, so I sought out industries
| that required ____". Almost as though computer science is a
| specialization within "real world" work?
|
| I guess I think that most industries are not the industries
| that you're seeking out. Most software developers are
| employed to combine already-solved problems with new inputs
| for money.
|
| What do you think?
| mdoms wrote:
| Can you give some examples of where computer science academic
| theory helped in software engineering?
| vbtemp wrote:
| People can go on all day about this. The most major one for
| me is protocol engineering - there's a whole world out
| there on this. Others would be model based design and its
| formal verification. Also several problems in state
| synchronization in distributed systems.
|
| In many of these cases, the team I joined had a code base
| in place that "kind of" did the solution, but was not
| grounded in any conceptual model - despite phenomenal code
| quality, peer reviews, etc. Recasting it as an
| implementation of a well-studied formal model generally
| yielded a codebase that was one-tenth the size of the
| original, and with far fewer defects. As I said in the
| parent comment, if you aren't familiar with this kind of
| stuff, you don't know about it, so you don't use it, so you
| find other (suboptimal) ways to do it.
| lliamander wrote:
| What are resources you reference the most in this kind of
| work?
| ipnon wrote:
| 1. Unix was cutting edge OS theory and gave birth to the
| microcomputer industry.
|
| 2. AWS was cutting edge distributed systems theory and gave
| birth to cloud computing.
|
| 3. Renaissance Technology was cutting edge algorithms
| theory and gave birth to quantitative hedge funds.
|
| Some people innovate for a living.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Unix was cutting edge OS theory? I mean, it was Bell
| Labs, and they were probably the premiere research
| facility in the world at the time, but my impression is
| that the trick on Unix was how small they were able to
| squeeze it, not that it was pushing theoretical
| boundaries.
|
| Can you point me to any aspects of Unix that were
| theoretically new?
| ptasker wrote:
| Dealing with unicode bugs taught me a lot about computer
| science academic theory. It helped to understand memory
| addresses and how encoding works.
| bcheung wrote:
| I use category theory quite frequently when doing
| functional programming. Unfortunately it is not taught in
| CS programs AFAIK. I rarely implement any tree kind of
| algorithms other than a simple tree visitor.
|
| An understanding of time/space complexity (Big O Notation)
| is also relevant to evaluating approaches. A senior level
| developer will use this to make high level choices.
|
| I also use compiler theory when writing parsers and simple
| DSL languages.
|
| Honestly, never really had to deal much with red-black
| trees or linked list algorithms.
| varjag wrote:
| A moderate complexity task such as writing a JPEG codec
| requires understanding of Huffman coding, discrete cosine
| transform and a number of other minor concepts.
|
| Right now am working on a physically distributed,
| synchornized system. It has some signal processing code:
| cross-correlation, FFT. The process planner builds spanning
| trees out of the layout graph to execute the tasks.
| stevofolife wrote:
| Tons: Cryptography, operating systems concepts including
| multi-threading, distributed systems, network
| communication, mobile and embedded systems which are basic
| backbones of all the things you use today. You know that's
| where majority of the tech companies are innovating on,
| right?
| Kalium wrote:
| I have definitely worked on systems that tried to do
| parallelism without any real understanding of underlying
| primitives or theory. They were not ideal.
| bfung wrote:
| Relevant comment from a few days ago about Linus Torvald's
| code handling of linked lists and the theory behind it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25327683
| Jtsummers wrote:
| - For parsing, the difference between context free
| languages and regular languages. This has helped in a
| number of projects (usually at the clean up end).
|
| - Boolean algebra has helped me _greatly_ simplify hard to
| understand nested conditionals.
|
| - Understanding data structures lets me pick the right ones
| for the problem.
|
| - Algorithm analysis has let me take program runtimes from
| minutes or hours on modest data sets down to seconds or
| minutes.
|
| - Discrete math topics helped me prove a problem that a
| coworker had spent a few weeks on was technically
| impossible.
|
| - Again for parsing, understanding the ideas of parsing let
| me make a number of parsers over the years using a variety
| of mechanisms. The critical part, though, was understanding
| _what_ was being parsed and _how_ to parse so the code was
| clear. I replaced convoluted code with hardcoded values and
| assumptions about what would be in each part (line, or
| binary blob) with something more flexible and less hacky.
|
| - Knowing how C stores data (stack versus heap) let me fix
| a _lot_ of code from some engineer colleagues that would
| work, sometimes, but not reliably because they didn 't
| understand how memory works.
| sweetsocks21 wrote:
| I tend to use it quite regularly. I've had to diagnose many
| performance issues with our large code base. Understanding
| compilers, data structures, networking, OS internals, etc,
| have all been quite helpful. Even if it's simply finding a
| starting point for tackling the problem.
|
| Sometimes it's trivial, replacing a for-each loop with
| something that's log(n) or O(1). Sometimes a little more
| complicated, like refactoring some code and realizing the
| original implementer was trying to do BFS but.. wrote
| something else. And the rarer cases are having to really
| dive in and trace some odd contention issues. All of these
| touch on what I learned in college at some level. Sometimes
| knowing something exists is helpful for looking up later
| and can save lots of time.
|
| I do wonder if it's less about "requiring" the education
| and more about someone seeking out the kind of work that
| uses the education. I know many people in my company are
| the opposite of me, and definitely do not care to go much
| deeper than implementing things until they work.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I wish the whole industry would at least get to that
| latter level. I see a fair amount of "jiggle it until
| it's no longer obviously broken".
| rubatuga wrote:
| Dictionaries for O(1) lookups, b-tree indexes for fast SQL
| queries, interval trees in genomics analysis software.
| mrits wrote:
| If this was an interview I'd say dictionaries aren't O(1)
| but one popular implementation of this collection is.
| aejnsn wrote:
| Please go pick up any of the Martin Fowler books. All are
| rooted in computer science fundamentals. Let's not pretend
| software engineering isn't rooted in computer science.
| That's a categorically false assertion.
| Kalium wrote:
| Knowing the properties of a data structure and how it works
| under the hood is incredibly valuable when deciding if it's
| a good answer to the problem at hand. If you don't know why
| hashing is important or what it gets you, you might not
| understand why a hashmap is a very powerful tool. You might
| choose some other structure or hand-roll something
| involving manually managing multiple arrays, and down the
| line run into what feel like intractable performance
| problems.
|
| That's just one example, pulled from people I've worked
| with. An understanding of fundamentals is required to do a
| real evaluation for yourself.
| tmotwu wrote:
| Boolean algebra, relational algebra, sets and graphs,
| reductions, runtime analysis, gossip and epidemic
| protocols, satisfiably, verification, turing machines, push
| down automata, etc.
| leetcrew wrote:
| it's a small thing, but I find it pretty useful to be
| comfortable with the basic boolean identities. makes it
| much easier to rearrange if conditions for readability
| without stressing that you might be changing behavior.
| helloitsian wrote:
| Personally, I see it come up in more vague areas during my
| Web Development. It's more along the lines of, "based off
| my understanding of X, I can assume this bit of JavaScript
| code works like this under the hood". Understanding how
| memory works traditionally keeps me "memory-conscience",
| but this may be redundant when working with JavaScript.
| When writing complicated operations I can use things I've
| learned previously to improve efficiency. To put it nicely,
| I'm not balancing binary trees and sorting my arrays with
| JavaScript. However, it was helpful when learning how the
| VDom works.
|
| In other industries...
|
| I started my Software Development journey with C, then
| moved into Game Development in C++ as my first job. Game
| Development DEFINITELY requires a lot of CompSci info (that
| I lacked). Hash Maps, Pathfinding, Matrix math, physics
| calculations, Linked Lists; all the works. We were also
| using a proprietary Game Engine so maybe with other Engines
| CompSci isn't as needed, I haven't worked in different
| engines.
| konjin wrote:
| I enjoy CompSci as a distraction - my background is pure
| maths/mathematical physics so don't think I don't appreciate
| abstract nonsense - but using it daily is impossible without
| a lot of contortions.
|
| Contortions I can do easily mind you, but other than
| recursive functions and linked lists any more complex data
| structures are too fragile to survive the harsh world of
| constantly changing business requirements.
|
| As a younger developer I wrote a beautiful algebra that
| described the company hierarchy for giving permission levels
| to people from active directory. Within a week I needed to
| scrap that and redo it from scratch because people needed
| permissions in the specific app that had nothing to do with
| their job position.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I agree with everything you're saying, but I didn't make the
| claims you're disputing. I don't think CS fundamentals are
| "useless" or "nonsense" by any stretch. There have been times
| in my career when I wished I had a stronger background. In
| particular, I've worked for NASA and in finance, and in both
| cases, I'd have benefitted from stronger statistics and math
| knowledge.
|
| My comment was that most (I would say the vast majority) of
| software engineer roles don't require a computer science
| background (emphasis on the science), and wouldn't leverage
| it even if you had it. If you _do_ have a strong CS
| background, it opens a lot of doors, and in particular opens
| doors to--in my opinion--more interesting and challenging
| work. There 's nothing bad about getting a CS degree. It's
| just not required for a software engineering job. I'm not
| being dismissive of the education. I'm skeptical of the idea
| that it's important for most roles.
| kylestlb wrote:
| "Many of the people who say this kind of stuff never really
| mastered the theory, and because they never mastered it they
| can't really use it, and because they can't really use it
| they find work that doesn't strictly require it, and then
| conclude it's useless..."
|
| this is quite the assertion. do you have any evidence
| supporting this statement?
| banachtarski wrote:
| I think the claim is easily sustained with just empirical
| evidence. If you want to do a career in embedded, or
| graphics, or robotics, or maybe flight control, etc.,
| you're going to need the math and the comp sci in droves.
| HN tends to have a crowd skewed towards certain
| disciplines, which is why every time the topic of a
| whiteboard interview shows up, most of the comments voice a
| strong opposition. In my line of work (graphics), the
| whiteboard is used all the time, both in and out of the
| interview.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > it's not useless, they just found success in a career that
| didn't need it.
|
| Or don't realize how often they actually do use the _skills_
| they learned in calculus class to solve problems that don 't
| necessarily involve derivatives or integrals but do require a
| methodical, structured approach to solve that isn't something
| you're born being able to do but must instead be honed
| through practice on "toy" problems.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| Agreed, but also some great moments are when you finally use
| something you learned and think "Oh, that's why they taught
| me that." Even if it's many years later and I did NOT master
| the concepts, I'm just aware of them. It's happened enough to
| me that I no longer have the opinion that stuff I learned was
| "useless" even if I don't use it. I might one day or someone
| else might encounter a problem that requires that knowledge.
| vbtemp wrote:
| I'll also say you won't just come across a problem that
| requires it, but rather you will apply that knowledge to a
| problem that never seemed to have needed it in the first
| place, and then you'll come up with a very powerful,
| compact, and resilient solution.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I came here to make a similar point. Electrical engineers study
| a certain amount of physics as part of their major, but their
| main focus and area of expertise is engineering, and you never
| hear them claim otherwise. If the main focus of a training is
| not to become a computer scientist, but to become someone who
| can engineer good software for real world applications, then
| don't call it a science degree.
|
| This list is, "a software engineering study plan to become a
| software engineer".
| worker767424 wrote:
| > Electrical engineers study a certain amount of physics as
| part of their major, but their main focus and area of
| expertise is engineering
|
| This is good. I took the E&M course for electrical engineers
| at my university, a very well-regarded engineering school. I
| ha no idea what I was doing. After every exam, I thought I'd
| have to drop the course. One of my scores was a solid B,
| another was the third highest. I got a B because I didn't
| know how to do the homework. Literally the only thing I could
| do was get the sign and units right in the multiple choice
| answer.
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| I think it honestly depends on what you do. I use data
| structures all the time; I just don't have to implement them.
| marta_morena_91 wrote:
| > Google and other big tech companies use these criteria to
| filter people out at the hiring stage, but the vast majority of
| work has nothing to do with any of this stuff.
|
| Yes, because at Google & Co. you actually NEED this stuff. I am
| not sure there is a day going by where being strong in math and
| computer science isn't immensely helpful for my job.
|
| The problem is: All other companies immitate Google, not only
| through interviews, but also by copying their "scalability"
| which is completely crazy. For instance relational databases
| are perfectly fine for like 99% of companies. Single servers
| would probably work well for another 90% of companies.
| Monoliths instead of micro services would work well for 90% of
| companies... It's crazy.
| sidlls wrote:
| At Google & Co. _you_ might need this stuff, but 99.9% of the
| other engineers _at Google & Co._ don't. Source: me, as I
| work at "& Co.", who employs numerous ex-Google staff, and
| have friends in other "& Co."s, etc.
|
| What Google & Co.'s engineers do is gatekeep. Sometimes it's
| out of ignorance, sometimes out of inappropriate
| generalization of their roles to others, and sometimes out of
| a deep angst caused by working in roles that effectively make
| almost all their CS-specific trivia next to useless in
| practice.
| catwind7 wrote:
| Most places will also probably have you spending a good chunk
| of time maintaining legacy code rather than inventing entirely
| new business units / products / platforms. I can't imagine what
| the maintenance burden is like at huge companies for existing /
| mature products. Anyone care to shed some light?
| tombert wrote:
| DISCLAIMER: I'm a dropout, never finished college.
|
| I think that a lot of the math subjects that they focus on in
| colleges can be of questionable utility (Much as I wish this
| were the case, I don't think I've touched calculus at all since
| I've started working, outside of the occasional personal
| projects doing game physics or something), but I do think that
| having a decent understanding of set theory and discrete
| mathematics has made me a better engineer, if for no other
| reason than it made it easier for me to pick up TLA+, which is
| incredibly helpful when used correctly, at least when
| designing/building distributed systems.
|
| That being said, I sadly feel like that basically any math is
| only useful earlier in your career. If you start working for
| one of the big FAANG-esque corporations, you end up doing
| substantially less compsci and spend a lot more of your time
| writing emails or sitting in meetings.
| ehsankia wrote:
| > and in 30 years, I've hardly used any of it.
|
| Isn't that similar to people saying "I've never used trig in 30
| years"? Isn't the point to train your brain to think in a
| certain way, more so than actually needing sines and cosines?
|
| For computer science specifically, the goal is to teach you to
| think in terms of loops, conditionals, recursion and so on.
| It's to train the muscle more so than memorize specific
| algorithms or data structures.
| CalChris wrote:
| I learned trig before I learned to program and the symbolic
| dexterity from trig was useful. I think kidz today will learn
| to program before they learn trig. I don't really have a
| point here.
| cole-k wrote:
| I'm still new to the industry, but my CS education (yours may
| differ) was quite theory-heavy.
|
| Perhaps the knowledge of data structures and algorithms can
| be useful for people who need to design whole architectures
| and systems, but I think the folks who are fixing bugs,
| tweaking the UI, or adding small features would benefit more
| from Code Complete than an Algorithms book.
| mcguire wrote:
| Note that you may find your career limited to fixing
| (simple!) bugs, tweaking UIs, and adding small features.
| google234123 wrote:
| That;s a sad career.
| nitrogen wrote:
| It's a career path that maximizes people helped rather
| than personal intellectual enjoyment.
| giantDinosaur wrote:
| I've done that kind of thing. It did not help many
| people, and I came to despise everything about my life.
| Give me _some_ intellectual enjoyment and I 'll be much
| more motivated to help people.
| vsareto wrote:
| > Isn't the point to train your brain to think in a certain
| way
|
| You might get that through other methods besides trig,
| meaning trig isn't strictly necessary -- it's just one option
| among potentially many. The hard part is proving efficacy and
| efficiency of each option.
|
| CompSci interview questions go way beyond loops, conditionals
| and recursion though, such that if you don't already know
| some secret sauces, it's unlikely to get the best case
| solution that the interviewer wants.
|
| The other thing throwing this off is interviews are looking
| for different grades of solutions or maybe just looking at
| your problem solving/communication skills, e.g. you can fail
| to find the best known solution but still get a job because
| of your reasoning.
|
| So in this way, the algorithms & data structures interviews
| can sometimes be used to test knowledge, or test problem
| solving ability, or both.
|
| The interview stopped being a test of "if you can do this
| job" and instead seeks to find a correlation backed up by
| some research that says "people that prepare, study, and do
| well at this interview also do well at this company". Similar
| research meant that they needed to stop asking brain teaser
| questions because it wasn't a good indicator of success.
| smithza wrote:
| An interviewer proposes this scenario: There is a school bus
| full of ping pong balls, all the way to the ceiling, filled
| from back to front. You are asked to estimate the number of
| ping pong balls while explaining your line of thinking.
| Questions are welcome--and answered if on the fact sheet.
|
| Explaining your abstract, critical thinking process seems
| much more valuable. HR screens someone for having the degree,
| assume they are familiar with all the facts (they can use
| Stack Overflow when they get in). Just learn how they think
| and how they communicate.
| varjag wrote:
| HR is unqualified labor attempting to do screening for
| qualified one, and they tired using tests which they
| themselves can comprehend as proxies for intelligence.
|
| (In past tense because this "Microsoft interview" style
| quiz was dropped by Microsoft themselves long ago)
| oscargrouch wrote:
| The screening is not optimized to find the best candidates,
| its just an arbitrary filter that will in the long term let
| some people that would be fundamental to the survival of the
| company out of it.
|
| Sometimes its good to accept that the uncertain things are
| uncertain.
|
| If i were them, i would find and train good "screeners",
| people with talent to spot talent and just let them do the
| job. Sometimes they will only have a hunch, giving their
| observations of things that escape most people of a
| particular candidate, and even without much to show of, they
| might be right.
|
| Later the top screener's would help the new ones to be better
| at their job, teaching their tricks.
|
| This is very subjective and personalized, and even if there
| might be some objective ways to train the screener's better,
| i think its just nuts trying to use objective tests to define
| a good hire.
|
| I bet with you that there are a lot of "human gold" out there
| that would only be detectable only when its too late for the
| company.
| sl1ck731 wrote:
| I think the issue is the filter is based on the specific
| algorithms and not that problem solving ability.
|
| There seems to be more emphasis on "the candidate knew to use
| bubble sort" or something stupid like that instead of "I
| observed this candidate reason through the problem and I
| don't really care that they didn't know a canned algorithm".
| carlmr wrote:
| I think a big point people miss is that you need intuition
| which algorithm fits where. You don't need the details of
| how it works, but if you have a good idea how it works you
| usually have a better intuition.
|
| It's a bad proxy, but better than no proxy in my opinion.
| ehsankia wrote:
| No, that's what _you_ assume they are looking at. You 're
| assuming they only look at whether you properly memorized
| bubble sort, but in reality good interviewers don't care if
| you don't even finish the problem or find the answer, they
| are looking at how you approach the problem and your
| problem solving skills.
|
| You often need strange problems to really get to see
| people's problem solving, which is why they're often not
| things you see in real life, but again, the goal isn't to
| see if people know how to do the strange thing, it's to see
| how they approach a novel problem from scratch. Aka problem
| solving skills.
| worker767424 wrote:
| I've really only used dynamic programming once on a real
| problem, but I have to pick the right data structure all the
| time and at least think about the algorithm. I've seen people
| write code that's anywhere from n^2 to exponential, only to see
| it fail pretty hard when working on production data.
| pickledcods wrote:
| > and in 30 years, I've hardly used any of it.
|
| So you don't see the sine in the sky from sunrise to sunset?
| imperio59 wrote:
| What differentiates a real career professional with someone who
| just "learned how to code" IS the fundamentals like Data
| Structures, Algorithms and their underlying math fundamentals.
|
| Sure, you can become a "senior" engineer even at a big tech
| company if you take a more product-focused track, but even
| there your lack of mastery of fundamentals will eventually
| limit and stunt your career growth, because those around you at
| the same level will have that deep understanding and knowledge
| to pull from when they actually need it for their job.
|
| Notice I didn't say this requires a COLLEGE education, I've met
| plenty of amazing, very senior engineers in my career with no
| formal degree or college education, but they sure as hell
| understood all the underlying fundamentals and theory of their
| field better than most.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| There's a big difference between understanding data structures
| and algorithms and being really good at solving algorithmic
| puzzles under time pressure. The former is what you need to
| know to do your job well (and much of that knowledge is at your
| disposal with a quick google search) but the latter is a
| useless skill that doesn't help you with anything but passing a
| coding interview. If you want to be hired by FAANG, don't waste
| your time learning intricate algorithms, but simply practice to
| solve coding puzzles in record time on whiteboards. It's a
| totally different skill set.
| cole-k wrote:
| I am inclined to agree. I think the issue is just with the HN
| title. The repo does say that it is for interview prep.
|
| I will say that I've seen some companies improve their
| interview questions to be less about having CS insight or
| algorithmic "tricks" and more about writing good code.
|
| But I've also been asked to essentially come up with
| quickselect in a 45 minute screener, the asymptotic analysis of
| which took me more than 45 minutes to understand.
| hertzrat wrote:
| It pays off in interviews to drill that stuff. If you want to
| be good at your job though, you just need to write a lot of
| code and understand design and architecture. The best book on
| this I read recently was "game programming patterns." Ive had
| cause to use about a third of the patterns in the book in the
| last year alone, and my code base got simpler and easier to
| modify each time. Big payoff. Don't read it start to finish
| though, use it as a resource for when you get stuck
|
| http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
| kthxb wrote:
| Maybe it is true that you got in a line of work where you
| rarely need those things; And you certainly got more experience
| than me. But I, for one, use and profit from the way of
| thinking I was taught in University very regularly.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Engineering is about learning how to learn. It's a skill you
| should use every day.
|
| If all someone knows is plumbing API and rote memorized glue
| code, don't expect much. If someone went through CS, expect to
| see a different caliber of work for the same task.
|
| Believe me, it's night and day and a lot of orgs have no clue
| what real engineering talent looks like: they never had any to
| begin with!
| worker767424 wrote:
| > but the vast majority of work has nothing to do with any of
| this stuff
|
| Like, it doesn't until it does, and when it does, it really
| does.
| ipnon wrote:
| This is an algorithms crash course for people interviewing at Big
| N.
| geogra4 wrote:
| Netflix?
| ipnon wrote:
| Big N for all N in Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google
| ...
| paxys wrote:
| Why the random "Google" in the title?
| sturza wrote:
| https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/why-i-studied-full-time-fo...
| paxys wrote:
| That doesn't really answer the question (also I see that the
| title is fixed)
| sturza wrote:
| Sorry, the idea is that this guy made a repo for how he
| wanted to study to get hired at google, and now it seems
| that a lot of people are contributing. I removed the google
| part from the title as i see now that it might have been
| misleading.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I studied about 8-12 hours a day, for several months.
|
| He lists 8 months of study and that before starting the
| curriculum he was "self-taught" meaning he at least knew how to
| code and do a little more than "hello world".
|
| If we add his "self-taught" time it gets us pretty close to an
| actual CS degree. He's missing language classes, some electives,
| math and stats but he's mostly there in terms of content. He's
| missing labs, projects, problem sets of course.
|
| When viewed like that it doesn't sound as clickbaity as the
| tittle implies, that you don't need a degree to go in the field.
| He's just a really really motivated self learner. And almost got
| a CS degree's worth of material.
|
| Kinda like Gates "dropping out" a few credits short of getting
| his diploma, not after failing intro to econ like a lot of "drop
| out entrepreneurs" out there.
| raztogt21 wrote:
| Don't you feel this learning path makes you a cookie cutter SE?
| gwerbret wrote:
| This is a bit off-topic, and is probably a naive question, so
| forgive me in advance for both.
|
| I've always been under the impression that "engineer" was a
| protected professional title, just like "medical doctor" or
| "lawyer", at least in part because there are certain legal
| responsibilities that come with the title. It's thus a little
| confusing to see the title being used, here on HN and elsewhere,
| by self-taught folks who have not gone through any formal
| education or professional accreditation. In fact, it seems that
| "dev" and "engineer" are used essentially interchangeably, only
| sometimes depending on whether the particular employment involves
| actual engineering.
|
| Does this mean that "engineer" is no longer considered a
| protected title? Or are software engineering and development (in
| the real world) considered so similar as to be indistinguishable?
| I'm asking out of genuine curiosity.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| >I've always been under the impression that "engineer" was a
| protected professional title
|
| Based on what? I always thought it was well known that there is
| pretty much no such thing in the IT world, and beyond that,
| Americans tend to as whole disdain the old worlds fascination
| with titles and the people in America who use and abuse them
| (lawyers are some of the shittiest people)... so perhaps you
| aren't American?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The National Society of Professional Engineers has managed to
| claim "Professional Engineer", "PE", and "EIT". They also have
| claim over "engineer" when used as self-promotion as a business
| or an independent contractor. However, they weren't able to
| have the claim on it as a job title stick. So, assuming you
| don't have PE quals: your consulting firm could not be gwerbret
| Engineering. Your job title at Microfang could be Software
| Development Engineer.
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| I got my engineering degree almost 30 years ago, and at my
| first job was working with other "engineers" who did not have a
| degree. I was dismayed at first, but got over it.
|
| I think it only matters if you're offering services to the
| public as an engineer, or if you're doing public-works
| projects. Then you need to be licensed as a Professional
| Engineer.
| milksteak42 wrote:
| "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure."[1]
|
| These coding challenges used to be a very good measure of
| ability, but now applicants are just memorizing the most common
| problems for each company. We're not at the point where these
| tests are useless but we will get there in the near future. The
| problem is that I haven't seen any good alternatives.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| indigochill wrote:
| > These coding challenges used to be a very good measure of
| ability
|
| I'm skeptical. The stereotypical interview question involves
| reciting algorithms from memory, where the thing you actually
| want to know of a software engineer is do they appreciate how
| things fit together to meet the constraints of the project.
|
| > The problem is that I haven't seen any good alternatives.
|
| Something we've done before (and had good success with in
| hiring good candidates) has been to pose a real problem we're
| dealing with now or have recently solved (so the solution and
| problems are fresh in the reviewers' mind) and ask the
| candidate for their solution at a high level. Not whiteboard
| coding, though. Something like if I tell you we're trying to
| filter out strings that contain creatively obfuscated
| obscenities, what should we do in order to maximize true
| positives while minimizing false negatives (and as the
| candidate offers solutions, provide sample strings that would
| fail their solution and see how they adapt)?
| will_pseudonym wrote:
| Do you mind if I ask what company you're with? I'd love to
| put it on my list of companies with good interview practices
| that I would want to apply to. If you're not comfortable with
| getting that specific, just for my personal curiosity, is it
| a FAAMG/big tech company, or other? haha :)
| indigochill wrote:
| It's definitely not silicon valley. Small European tech
| company, very much just making things up as we go.
| centimeter wrote:
| I agree that the predictive power of jeopardy-style interview
| questions has collapsed. However, I think it's still quite
| predictive to ask more design-oriented and less algorithm-
| oriented questions, especially if there is some leeway for
| creative choice. It's also relatively easy to detect people who
| have simply heard and memorized the question, since when you
| ask them for extemporaneous expansion on some aspect of the
| question, they usually fall apart.
| cole-k wrote:
| The same can be said for the SAT. Unfortunately there seems to
| be significant enough overlap between "good test taker" (or in
| this case "good interviewee") and "good worker".
| centimeter wrote:
| Studying for the SAT won't actually improve your score much
| on expectation, but taking it multiple times of course will
| increase your expected score (since they take the max).
|
| SAT is basically an IQ test, which is of course a reasonably
| strong predictor of white collar job performance (ceterus
| paribus).
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I don't think its 'of course'. A study at the UofIowa
| showed only one correlation between tested psychological
| features and job performance (as measured by 1-year
| evaluation). It was 'conscientiousness'. That is, if you
| kept at a task until it was actually and fully done, your
| boss/coworkers valued your contribution.
|
| That's it. Not about being smart or educated.
| centimeter wrote:
| The conclusion of this IQ vs job perf paper is "it's
| complicated", but essentially every meta study they cite
| is pretty unequivocal that IQ predicts job performance. h
| ttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/#!po=
| 0.... The only room for doubt is in confounding effects
| like the fact that people with higher IQs are likely to
| enter more mentally difficult professions.
| MivLives wrote:
| The best coding challenge I had to do was when the company
| basically gave me a set of requirements, said build this. Took
| about an hour. Then during the interview, I was asked about my
| decisions, and blockers. Afterwards I was given another feature
| to add. This took another half an hour.
|
| I wish more companies would do this. The hardest part for me at
| least is staring at a blank document.
| catwind7 wrote:
| different companies need different skills and it changes even
| as a company grows. Part of the frustration about this entire
| process is that it feels very cookie cutter and sort of like
| a lowest-common-denominator type effort on behalf of
| companies.
|
| Huge companies like google are for the most part hiring
| people they can slot into almost any team in the org so it
| makes sense for them to place less emphasis on tooling
| expertise. They have plenty of time and money to upskill
| employees.
|
| The same can't be said for the vast majority of consumer
| start ups that really just need people who can rapidly
| prototype.
|
| Of course those groups are not mutually exclusive, I just
| think it's sad that everyone has adopted the approach that
| works for a select few companies
| latenightcoding wrote:
| clickbait title, this has no affiliation to google. edit: title
| changed now.
| sturza wrote:
| I removed that part as i saw it's misleading
| oscargrouch wrote:
| This sort of stuff is meant to leave the anarchists and the rule
| benders out of the company.
|
| Its requires certain psychological threats to by guided to
| memorize and do all this stuff.
|
| I bet a lot of people with the actual right skills would not pass
| into those exams.
|
| It reminds me if a great lesson from the prince from Maquiavel,
| where he speaks about what sort of soldiers should be used and
| say that the mercenary soldiers should be the last resort,
| because giving they do not really believe into what they are
| doing, in the battle field they wont make the best soldiers.
|
| Well, the filtering here will optimize for people willing to
| force themselves into this for a good salary, of course they can
| by chance get the passionate type, but they are not optimizing
| for it, and that's the point.
|
| I rather work with people that are passionate about it, they are
| the ones that do the "impossible" things because they dont just
| do what they are told.
|
| And this kind of people will at a certain point in their lives
| have nothing to show. But the curious, the creative, the people
| that learn fast, that are always hungry how can a company get
| them through this?
| mynegation wrote:
| What is the relationship to Google, mentioned in the title here?
| Cannot find any reference.
| ptasker wrote:
| Repo was created by this guy:
| https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/why-i-studied-full-time-fo...
| bcheung wrote:
| This is a good starter list for the more Computer Science skills
| but I see little in the way of practical skills. It's definitely
| nice to have these skills but let's be real, you aren't going to
| use them on a daily basis.
|
| I would add learning a few of the most popular languages and
| frameworks depending on your area of interest.
|
| Without those practical skills I'm pretty sure you will be passed
| up during interviews.
|
| When hiring, I look for people who can get stuff done first and
| foremost. I don't care if they have to look things up and don't
| have things memorized. Efficient "stack overflow driven
| development" is real world development.
|
| Then if they have those skills I look to see what kind of theory
| and architectural understanding they have. Those are secondary.
|
| The more senior the candidate the more I expect them to have CS
| and architectural background so I would normally forgive not
| knowing the CS theory stuff for junior developer candidates.
|
| But practical "get it done" skills in the relevant language and
| frameworks are a minimum requirement for everyone.
|
| One other thing that I would add is to customize your study plan
| based on where you want to apply. Startups will favor more
| practical skills during the interview. Larger companies and
| enterprises will favor more of the traditional CS during
| interviews.
| sockgrant wrote:
| > It's definitely nice to have these skills but let's be real,
| you aren't going to use them on a daily basis.
|
| I mean, practice for the job you want.
|
| The majority of software jobs don't need this stuff -- writing
| frontend code, writing some backend services, mobile.... the
| type of work where you a) aren't building the platforms / tools
| everything is based on b) don't need the best performance, just
| need it to work OK.
|
| But there are plenty of jobs that do need this stuff. Working
| on an OS, or database, or a product used by millions, or a
| large scale platform...
| CalChris wrote:
| Godbolt (CS61C should probably have a Godbolt lab.)
|
| Coursera Fundamentals of Parallelism on Intel Architecture
|
| Emphasize STL, Boost, OpenMP, MPI, NUMPY, containers, ...
| ra7 wrote:
| Previous discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12649740
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15898263
| vasilakisfil wrote:
| Studying theory to become a SE is one thing. Being a SE is
| another thing. Being able to communicate with your (tech or non
| technical) colleagues in a constructive/useful way is also
| another important thing.
|
| What I have seen is that a lot of software engineers lack
| communication skills. Being able to deal and communicate with
| other people, feel empathy, see things from their perspective,
| deal with non technical POs or managers, crazy CEOs, offensive
| colleagues and all sort of things is something that should be
| taught before you enter the market somehow. And when I say "deal"
| and "communicate" I mean it in the most fruitful way for you,
| your colleagues, the company. In that order.
|
| So "being" a SE is not only knowing the theory.
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