So say I'm a Java developer. But surely in order to be a good Java developer I should know the innards of the JVM, right? To do that I now have to also have to know C++ because that's what JVM is implemented in or whatever. But surely I can't know C++ well if I don't know C, right? But then I can't really grasp C well enough if I don't understand how assembly works, right? What about CPU instructions, different architectures, etc?
My opinion is that nobody should even try to drink what seems to be an ever expanding ocean of knowledge in IT. Let the people (in academia or wherever) who work on algorithms work on algorithms, let the people who write frameworks continue writing frameworks and let the rest of us code monkeys to use all those digested tools and technologies to do what we have to do on daily basis. You don't ask a common plumber to describe Bernoulli's principle during an interview, do you?
In addition I think the argument falls apart the closer down you get. Granted I am no C expert but I don't think you need to know any assembly to be a very good C developer.
You can get away without knowing assembly, but you might as well just use a higher level language at that point.
As a software developer I see myself mainly as someone who solves problems to help others do their work better. So, while I agree that having a strong CS background is definitely a benefit, I don't think it matters that much if you can't get binary trees just right after not needing to implement them for years.
Yup. And my feel on that is that (assuming the perf issue is related to a core data structure), that -particular- perf issue shouldn't even have happened in the first place. It should have been obvious given the right background and you could have spent that time doing something less fundamental.
Do you have to reach out for google or a book to do a simple if/else statement? What about a for loop? Now what about the difference between a map and a set? Likely not, it's the basics used in any app.
Talking about premature optimization here implies there's some work to be done, things to think through, stuff that's not obvious. And that's totally true at a certain complexity level.
But what is "complex" and what is "obvious" isn't objective. It's purely a factor of what the "average software developer" knows.
What I'm arguing is that while at one point the pendulum was swinging too far one way, it's now too far in the other, and it's affecting software quality industry wide.
For example why cant they just ask. Ok givin an array find all the pairs of the array. Great now whats the big O of that. Great...
Instead they ask some trick question that disguises the fact that you should solve this problem by finding all pairs etc.
I have issues with people who dismiss the problem space entirely. "I don't need to know CS fundamentals to do my job". To which I say: you do. You're just doing a subpar job because -everyone else- is and that's the standard even though it's suboptimal.
(Note I don't have a CS background myself, and thought this for a long time, until I ended up working in environments that were CS heavy and seeing how "hard problems" were trivialized, so we could spend time solving "real" problems instead)
IMO, what's relevant for a role is the skill set most people currently doing that role have and that's not always a good thing.
I've been the first shouting on top of a roof that we shouldn't ask people to know stupid little algorithm trivias to get a job. But the narative for that quickly devolved to "data structures and algorithms are not important for day to day work". To which I honestly say bullshit. The industry is managing without it: between people who forgot everything from school, bootcamps, self taughts, and people with alternate degree, people who can do actual computer science on the job are a tiny, tiny minority. So the solutions those people come up with to day to day problems are considered a speciality (eg: "machine learning!", "data science!").
But if doing that shit was just second nature to everyone, how would it change the way we do things? What if category theory wasn't so scary? What if people weren't scared of threads? What if hashmaps were not magical black boxes people use because the person who wrote the code before them did?
The foundation is becoming pretty darn weak if you ask me.
I totally agree shit like HackerRank is poorly done. But I'm not sold that the skillset it tries to assess (poorly!) is that useless. We, as a community and an industry, essentially did everything we could to MAKE IT useless. That's different I think.