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Trying to switch my job. Applied for a well known company. Gave an interview today. I don't fucking get the obsession of these developer recruiters so fixated on data structures and algorithms. I know it's a massive part of computer science but guess there is no fucking room left to innovate in there. There are legitimate researcher teams working for implementation of these barebones inside system foundations. No general software developer gives a fuck about this piece of shit discipline of study. You wanna know why they propagate this as the panacea to test people because it's fucking easy. Give a project to somebody as interview procedure, it'll take time to bring out an interesting problem and an interesting solution to that. Sorry to say but all these data structure enthusiasts are nothing better than board game enthusiasts.

Also why can't you refer existing solutions to create your solution. I've seen some good problems which actually require you to think. But again those are heavy and can't be tested so you're left with reversing a fucking linked list with O(1) auxillary space. Fuck me ig.

Moreover, what the fuck is wrong with the moral policing internet crowd. Its so sad. I've hardly seen anybody rant about this piece of shit system put in place to push the absolute dead-end nutcases up the ladder. Every other search for it returns a Quora link with some Indian guy complaining about his interviews and in the comments you have the same scholars sitting in their data structure throne imparting knowledge about how data structure holds the fabric of reality together.

I don't hate data structures and algorithms as a subject. It is cool and quite extensive but once you try to make that as a metric of all the knowledge in the world, you've lost my drift. Maybe I'm just angry with the state of things. Maybe I'm just angry with token Quora crowd.

Comments
  • 0
    "piece of shit discipline"

    "I don't hate it"

    I smell dishonesty
  • 1
    @iiii fleeting thoughts, hence the rant haha.
  • 2
    Yeah, I've rented about this plenty, but mainly in comments.

    Give me someone who can write decent, modular, well tested and well structured code and I'm good. Beyond that, I care way more about whether I enjoy working with them than if they can explain the internals of mergesort. On the flip side, I've met many people who can happily discuss algorithmic approaches to mitigate the worst case of quicksort, but can't put a sane unit test together to save their life.

    Some jobs call for it of course, especially research positions where you're head deep in algorithmic complexity. But for most positions you're correct, it's entirely dumb and a terrible metric. (And I say this as someone who really quite enjoys those sorts of algorithmic challenges.)
  • 3
    Its pretty frightening that most of “Big Software Company” exists of software developers that are essentially Leetcode grinders. I’ve heard too many stories about what a nightmare it is to work in such places especially when it comes to on-call.
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