Re:Ask HN: What if I missed the good stuff in my undergradua...
by dhume on Monday August 16, 2010 @10:27PM
(#1610034)
The post mentioned in the OP (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608129) mentions some cases where knowledge about how compilers work would be useful and offers a warning about what may happen to those without this understanding:
"In fact I used to ask candidates, as a standard interview question, how they'd find phone numbers in a tree of HTML files, and many of them (up to 30%) chose to write 2500-line C++ programs as their answer."
Not that this necessarily describes you (since I don't even know what you work on), but I've heard it said (here, I think) that if CRUD is all you know, CRUD is all you'll ever do.
"In fact I used to ask candidates, as a standard interview question, how they'd find phone numbers in a tree of HTML files, and many of them (up to 30%) chose to write 2500-line C++ programs as their answer."
Not that this necessarily describes you (since I don't even know what you work on), but I've heard it said (here, I think) that if CRUD is all you know, CRUD is all you'll ever do.