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by lubujackson
1208 days ago
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That is a fine and common opinion, but just one question: how often have you inverted a binary tree at your job? Because after nearly 20 years it hasn't come up once for me. I am sure for some roles it is a necessary skill but my issue is that most of these questions are more or less toy problems that come from academia and not business. They are a great test of your retention of a data structure class but not super relevant beyond that. I would rather hire an engineer with a strong business or user sense - reading between the lines of requests and anticipating future issues or uses adds so much more value in a real sense. To me, these are great entry level questions because it is a good baseline for new grads when you have little work experience to judge. Past that, it is like making a lawyer take a mini bar exam for every new job - a waste of effort if you want to hire for specific skills and experience. |
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In my old team, I had to come up with a coupon distribution logic based on count, percentage, time, then generating reproducable random values that required to deep dive (algorithm) into library code & explicitly storing state in redis, then an application of dynamic programming in building as custom platform, atomic token validation, custom rate limiter algo, state machine, scheduler, distributed circuit breaker, etc.
In my current team, I had to read raft paper, zab paper, look into their implementation, make a poc with raft protocol, then autoscaling algorithms, scheduler algo's, different data structures, heck even the oss engine itself is DAG, heavy threads + concurrency stuff. Even now I come across new data structures and algorithms.
Clearly you don't know the entire industry, just because you haven't worked in such teams, doesn't mean these aren't important.
You are experienced in a bubble. The hiring bar for our team is higher than other teams and heck even for SDE3 - the requirement is higher. You would be very much surprised to know that even the senior members have research publications and deal with complex stuff.
Core teams like in AWS or GCP or Azure solve these sort of problems.
Who do you think will solve autoscaling (that's what I'm doing now) or managed scaling or network or security or any infra problems in these cloud platforms ?
As experience increases, we expect more knowledge & insights - doesn't mean to ignore basic coding stuff like arrays or linked lists or trees or graphs or simple message queues or etc.
If companies are paying competitive TC and there are multiple candidates, why not hire a smart person ? What's so special about doing regular normal stuff ? That's just a normal dev right ?