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by 29athrowaway 1527 days ago
If you have a computer science degree, you are expected to know fundamental topics such as data structures and algorithms.

As a professional software engineer, you are expected to be proficient at those skills to an extent in which you can demonstrate them in practice.

The burden of verifying you acquired the skills associated with your education falls on the employer.

Fizzbuzz is trivial and should not be a problem for any developer at any level. Writing a binary search function should not be a problem either.

But I agree that the industry's obsession with competitive programming has gone too far in some cases, especially in cases where the skills being tested are not relevant for the job.

1 comments

no, the burden falls on the college. that is the point, if the college is good, then you cannot graduate unless you mastered both theory and practice. and i am not talking about fizzbuzz, read my comment.
In an ideal world, yes.

In practice, many colleges fail to teach those skills.

And accreditions depend on governments which are sometimes corrupt or inept.

companies can keep a list of universities and decide to only screen those who do not have a degree from those universities. the list can be dynamically changed based on on the job feedback.

any university in western europe is pretty hard to graduate at without actually having these skills. so it is pointless to enforce coding interviews for those who graduated there. you can’t “buy” a degree there.