The app store and code signing have been fairly bureaucratic to deal with from day one. It's actually improved compared to the initial years from turn around times measuring in a day or two vs a week or two. I remember doing such tricks such as resubmitting the same binary and it getting passed. It really is a dice roll.

Compile times comes from swift and promoting it too early because it was too immature. If you write your code in objective-c, your fast compile times will come back. Swift compile times have been improving as time goes on.

They also don't pay as well compared to google or facebook. But even then I think it's more a management thing, since they determine the priorities in software dev.

Swift compile times will never be close to ObjC or C compile times, no matter how much engineering goes into it. This is because of how the language is designed, it requires a typechecker which solves an NP hard constraint solving problem.

What swift compiler devs complain most about is about how operator overloading causes some sort of O(n^k) or worse check, because things like the '+' operator has dozens of implementers.

If your really worried about type inference slowing you down, you can write out all of your types like you didn't have type inference. You could even do it in an automated fashion like your source code was some sort of cache.

They're certainly losing the lead in software engineer talent (giving it away to whom, I'm not sure).

I keep on interviewing recent Comp Sci graduates who have a 3.75 or a 4.0 and who can't tell me how to implement cycle detection -- to the extent that they could write a pseudocode function signature or some kind of concretely implementable design. Many of the same grads try to tell me that a null pointer in a C structure uses no memory and other nonsense like that. You know what I think? I think the CA grad student population no longer knows those things, so they are producing undregrads who know even less.

my MBP crashes when plugging in an external monitor, etc?

When my Macbook Pro is "locked" it flashes an image of the desktop screen just before switching to the login prompt.

However Computer Engineering programs teach those concepts as the focus is on low power micro controllers.

This sort of thing is very relevant for someone writing an application or a server process. Programmers who can write their own compiler are much better C and C++ programmers, because they have relevant background. Programmers who understand the low level stuff can write faster code when it's important, and they know better where to look when optimizing. Since when has our "field" become so flubby that we're now eschewing the notion of background knowledge?

Are you telling me that we are churning out Comp Sci grads who couldn't write their own low level libraries or compilers? Tech people should have at least a working knowledge of how their own tools work, to the extent that if civilization fell, they could have a good chance of recreating primitive versions of those things.

However Computer Engineering programs teach those concepts as the focus is on low power micro controllers.

Also relevant to high performance code. Also relevant to game engines. Also relevant to interfacing servers with legacy code. Also relevant to technology like WASM. Whoever decided to relegate stuff like that to Computer Engineering seems guilty of the same ignorance I see in these recent students.

I do mainly frontend web development with EmberJS, and occasionally work on our backend which is also JS, and I've been doing that for a little over 2 years now.

I never went to college and so a lot of the stuff you guys have been talking about in this thread goes right over my head. I've never written a compiler, the last time I wrote any C++ was high school, and I would so easily fail a lot of these interviews if those were the questions being asked. With all of that said, I think I do a good job at what I do without all of that knowledge. The industry is increasingly heading towards web/app dev in a lot of positions as other people mentioned, and I think it's very elitist to judge people for not knowing everything you do, even if you think it's important. The fact that this industry is becoming so open to so many people is amazing. Me being able to find a good job without a college degree just because of my knowledge of computers is what I love about tech. I think mindsets like yours are what help drive people away from it because they think they need a ton of knowledge to get an entry-level job, and that's just simply not true.

I don't want to sound like I'm accusing you of being malicious, I just wanted to share my point of view as someone who is relatively new to the industry and never went to college and doesn't have the knowledge that you are suggesting is very relevant. Maybe it is relevant and I just haven't figured that out yet, but from where I'm sitting that feels like something that could be taught instead of a hard and fast rule for hiring.

Fair enough. However, if someone did go to college, they should at least know what they know, and know what they don't know. If someone is applying to a job with a 3.75 GPA where they might be doing some C++ and they go into an interview and try to tell you that a null pointer takes up no data, they haven't been well served by their education. They should at least know what they don't know, and not waste everybody's time.

However, you should know that these things are important. There are levels of knowledge deeper than being just a user of something.

I think mindsets like yours are what help drive people away from it because they think they need a ton of knowledge to get an entry-level job, and that's just simply not true.

So a generalist Comp Sci degree just needs to shrink into Web Development because of your feelings? Look, Web Development is a fine job, but it's not the same as a generalist field of knowledge like Comp Sci. Should mechanics expect that a Physics degree only be limited to their knowledge because of their feelings? They're applying Physics, after all. (Warning: don't you go and denigrate mechanics! That would be elitist.)

The very fact that you can have a job in tech without a Comp Sci degree isn't a justification for the dumbing down of Comp Sci. It shows that it happened needlessly!

Maybe it is relevant and I just haven't figured that out yet, but from where I'm sitting that feels like something that could be taught instead of a hard and fast rule for hiring.

Let's say you discovered an interviewee thought that a 404 meant the request never made it to the server. Let's say they also got a 4.0 GPA at some Web Development coding academy with a great reputation. Wouldn't you at least be scratching your head?

These are things that used to be taught in a Computer Science degree. Now they aren't taught, and companies are going to have to teach new graduate hires this stuff that people used to take multiple semesters to learn? It also used to be that Freshmen in college were expected to know how to conjugate verbs and compose grammatically correct sentences. Now TAs (I used to be one) are expected to teach these things to Freshmen. How is this not a decline in standards?

I think, generally speaking, the overlap in a Venn diagram of that would actually be relatively small.

But what I was suggesting is that one does not need to be capable of being both a compiler author and an application developer (if, for the sake of discussion, we avoid any semantic arguments and treat these as generally different things) to be of good value. I don't know how to, say, write a proper lexer, or write any assembly worth any salt at all, but I can write what I consider to be good, reliable application code at a reasonable level of productivity.

I don't see how your first point is related to the second. The goal for most webapps is to get something that works most of the time. Most software engineers simply don't need to worry about their third nine, much less their fourth

But the imperative/procedural mindset that it drills into you leads to some really terrible application code, and it takes a lot of exposure to higher level languages to break out of that mindset. It took me years. Switching to ruby was like starting from scratch.

By all means hire a C++ programmer to write your web app. They'll be able to debug your performance issues ricky tick. But also be prepared for some heinous procedural js/ruby/php/clojure/elixer/whatever.

No one is advocating that anyone write web apps with C++. There are other kinds of servers. The complaint is that the once generalist value of a Comp Sci degree is now dumbed down, and grads are missing background knowledge they once had.

But also be prepared for some heinous procedural js/ruby/php/clojure/elixer/whatever.

This is yet another failing of Comp Sci degrees.

There was a fairly good chance you would end up needing to write your own data structures, algorithms, sockets code and come up with a network protocol. You would run compilers, linkers, etc. Basically systems programming lined up with the job market.

Naturally after that I thought that was the "proper" way to teach CS. It worked for me. I got a jobs doing things I learned.

20 years later, I literally haven't run a compiler in years. I use libraries for data structures. I don't need to worry about allocating memory, billion dollar industries run on scripting languages. People are passing functions to functions that return functions like that's how it's always been.

I guess my point is "generalist" education needs to evolve with the industry. That means spending less time on low level details so you can spend more time on the tools, techniques and concepts used today. It isn't a "dumbing down" - it is changing the mix. You can only do so much in 4 years. What was "generalist" 20 years ago is "specialist" today, and it should be.

When it's leaving out background information, it's dumbing down. Programmers should at least know the basics of how indirection works. Why is it that so many interviewees with gold-pated GPAs would tell me null pointers used up no memory? Do they have the foggiest idea what happens when they add a member in a Python/Ruby program and how that differs from adding a pointer to a struct?

There's a difference between having the background information and treating everything as if it's hazy magic. It's excusable for the buyer of a car to treat the product they've bought as a magic black box. It's inexcusable when a "mechanic" or "engineer" is incapable of doing anything but treating things like magic black boxes.

Scripting languages were for unwashed systems administrators, and no real programmer would touch them.

But all of the smarter people in my program knew two or more of them.

no real programmer would touch them. Functional programming was a weird little academic thing with no future. OO was "if it is a noun make it a class".

I worked for a company that had to fight against those prejudices and low levels of knowledge to sell licenses. We sold licenses to Fortune 500 companies so they could run billion dollar businesses on a "scripting language." You know what prepared my for working there? A generalist Comp Sci education!

20 years later, I literally haven't run a compiler in years. I use libraries for data structures. I don't need to worry about allocating memory, billion dollar industries run on scripting languages.

But you are a savvy user of those libraries because you have the background knowledge. You don't usually need to worry about allocating memory, but you know what the gotchas in extreme corner cases are. And if you had to have a custom library written in C++ for your dynamic language application, you'd know how to spec that out and hire for that while looking out for the details. I had at least a foggy idea past the buzzword level when I graduated. How about the kids who are graduating nowadays?

I got my CS degree in 98

In 98 I was in grad school.

You can only do so much in 4 years. What was "generalist" 20 years ago is "specialist" today, and it should be.

Here is what I see in way too many recent grads with a 3.75 GPA. They don't know any of the background, past a handwavy level. They have misconceptions that are outright wrong. Many of them seem to spend 4-5 years doing nothing but using libraries and gluing stuff together. Hell, we learned that stuff too -- but we learned a bunch of other stuff at the same time, plus we learned what we didn't know and what to do about it. Then again, there was a contingent who only cared about learning X-Windows, because there were lots of coding jobs in X-Windows. Aren't the people who only learn particular technologies that are in the job market the moral equivalent?

Comp Sci is dumbing down to the level of consumers of magic tech. I know engineers and physicists who would have some idea of how to begin to recreate the tech they use if civilization would fall. I think a lot of Comp Sci graduates, if they wound up with nothing but machines running machine code, would qualify for Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.

Of course not all of this is because I leaned C first. A lot of it was simply due to being a new programmer. But this kind of code is more prevalent in general in the C world. Just browse some opensource C projects.

I believe a lot of this stems from the "systems programming" mindset that goes along with learning C and C++. The requirements are very precise and well known, and don't change often. There is often a fairly precise "right answer" for how to do something where the "right answer" is some combination of performance metrics. Compilers are like that, file systems are like that, tcp/ip stacks are like that, etc. The programming boundaries tend to be very bright.

The "systems programming" mindset is a liability when writing business apps where a sales person can blow up every assumption and design decision and boundry in one day. The "right answer" is not clear, and not easily measured. The "right answer" has more to do with writing code that is flexible and easy to change. That is hard to measure and a totally different way of thinking.

I think the issue is more that the skillset follows the money. If you are a top web developer who can work in adtech/fintech/e-commerce and contract then you will make far more money doing that than you ever would in pure systems engineering. It's not so much that background knowledge is fluff, moreso that their focus is probably a lot more scattered than it used to be, and their background knowledge is perhaps in other places.

Sure, sure. But how many companies care about that sort of thing? C is rather my best language, and as far as I can tell, that helps me out as a sysadmin, but I need to be good at some EMCAscript based framework if I want a higher-paying Software Engineering job, at least outside of the embedded space (and I'm not that good at C. Also, most of the embedded types I know don't get paid SWE level salaries.)

I'd also mention I've never had to write an Assembler or Emulator in my work nor have the majority of my peers have had to do that.

Then I should hope you know enough VM-fu to be able to optimize a JavaScript application.

I enrolled in a CS program as a self-taught programmer specifically because I wanted a better grounding in the theoretical foundations.

I had someone in an interview in Berlin ask me to write a garbage collector. In CSC 202, our professor talked about using reference counts. Reference counts can get leaks if you have two objects referencing each other with to path to either, but what I didn't realize is that Java hasn't used reference counts in a really long time. It does a search from each root (typically a thread) down the object tree; and it breaks things into young/old (eden space and .. something else) so long lived objects don't get searched as often.

I learned all of that during the interview lunch break when I looked it up on my phone. One of my good friends wrote a compile time GC for GO and did this PhD dissertation on it, and he probably would have got this question right. But if it's not in your field, well the problem space for problems is pretty fucking large.

Cycle detection? Man I could probably tell you back when I studied minimum spanning trees and wrote this thing to implement Dijkstra's shortest path:

https://penguindreams.org/projects/graphmapper/

Off the top of my head, I'd hope each node had a unique identifier and I guess I'd mark them/store the keys in a hash table. I'd move breath first and error out if I discovered the same hash/unique key .. which of course would give me a hash the size of the tree. Unless there's a way to mark the data structure, you now have a second structure the size of your key space.

I'm sure there are better solutions, but I wouldn't expect a senior program to know them off the top of their head, unless you're hiring really specifically for a position writing routing algorithms or looking for a senior airport transit architect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Floyd%27s_Tort...

If you come up with something else (like tagging nodes), you get a strike for inefficiency.

It looks simple enough to feel smug about once you know it, at the same time there's near zero chance the interviewers could come up with this algorithm independently without prior knowledge.

Not necessarily. Sometimes the dataset only has on the order of 10k nodes, and you just want to warn users if they create a cycle, or keep particular routines from going into an infinite loop.

If you come up with something else (like tagging nodes), you get a strike for inefficiency.

A few days ago, I implemented cycle detection in an event notification system where the graph size is relatively small in just 4 lines of code, which should be immediately understandable by any competent programmer. That you should mandate Floyd's algorithm in all cases gives you a strike for pedantic design without regard to cost/benefit.

We are both saying this.

Jeez. I think my profs covered ref counting as an introduction, then also went on to cover mark/sweep and generational collectors. We also covered compaction, copying and bump allocation. I don't think it took that long. If I were running a shop that focused on, say Java, I would want to know if my new hires knew background information relevant to optimizing code running on the JVM.

Cycle detection? Man I could probably tell you back when I studied minimum spanning trees and wrote this thing to implement Dijkstra's shortest path:

Someone should have given you breadth first search and depth first search, then ran you through how those are components to other algorithms. You should have been left with those as a "toolbox" such that you automatically spend a second thinking, "what would happen to that graph if I did DFS or BFS on it." That kind of toolbox is powerful and gives you all sorts of useful insights. You are not the only one around here to say, "Man I could probably tell you back when..." What you should be thinking now is that you were not well served by some of your teachers. Fortunately, this sort of thing is easily rectifiable.

Off the top of my head, I'd hope each node had a unique identifier and I guess I'd mark them/store the keys in a hash table.

Well good on you. You just did better than most of my last 6 interviewees.

Unless there's a way to mark the data structure, you now have a second structure the size of your key space.

This is the DFS/BFS part right here. Is the 2nd part of your statement likely to be true, and how often would it be true? Good call on the marking. (EDIT: Just thought of it: Bloom filter.)

I'm sure there are better solutions, but I wouldn't expect a senior program to know them off the top of their head

Cripes! Freshmen used to be able to do this stuff!

unless you're hiring really specifically for a position writing routing algorithms or looking for a senior airport transit architect.

How about you don't want programmers who will end up debugingg an infinite loop induced by a data cycle every single time?

EDIT: I actually just wrote cycle detection for my side project in golang the day before yesterday. It took me 4 additional lines of code. If you have a shop that uses gob or some kind of object serialization, this may well be very relevant!

And either way, if I were to ask this question, I would spend a lot of time helping the person along the way to make sure they were able to make the logical leaps that made sense to them, not to me.

Lots of 3.5+ GPA grads can't make that logical leap!

The whole freaking point of a GC like say Java's is that an average programmer can use it without having to understand how exactly it's implemented. Of course it won't hurt to know that, but it's not at all mandatory knowledge.

One just has to know which situations the GC can't cope with and avoid them. For Java there's at least one open source dedicated tool for finding leaks, it nicely explains what one needs to know.

Unfortunately, many programmers believe that since Java uses garbage collection, you do not have to think about GC and ownership at all.

Oracle had to replace the fast implementation of substring that just returns a slice of a String (O(1) time) by a copying implementation (O(n)), because too many programmers do not know the basics of ownership/garbage collection and would accidentally hold on to larger strings.

Seeing the implementation details of reference counting, mark-sweep collection, and perhaps a generational collector once, makes you more aware of memory and ownership issues, even if you forget the nitty gritty details later.

I spent years at a vendor for a Virtual Machine. That you would compose such a sentence shows that you are ignorant of some aspects of optimization. You don't even know what you don't know, and projected that ignorance on another.

The whole freaking point of a GC like say Java's is that an average programmer can use it without having to understand how exactly it's implemented.

One of my company's most frequent consulting tasks was helping clients optimize to maximize throughput for the generational GC. That you jumped to the conclusion that I was talking about memory leaks is pretty damning.

This used to happen to me and I was very annoyed. Felt like a major security hole.

But now I get a scrambled image before the login prompt. Are you on the latest macOS?

I knew some back in the early 80's who didn't know what a CPU register was.

You should read this before asking that again http://www.nihlos.com/2009/05/04/stupid-interview-questions/

When my Macbook Pro is "locked" it flashes an image of the desktop screen just before switching to the login prompt.

Same with my Mac Mini on the lock screen. Very easy to start a camera going (say an iPhone) waggle the mouse and get a screenshot of any locked Mac.

When I leave my Mac I always do a ctrl-shift-eject/power to force the lock immediately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Applications

Examples where it's not desired, and what to do: Detecting infinite redirects in browsers and stopping the loop. Detecting thread deadlock and terminating the process. Detecting looping references in an Excel spreadsheet and showing #ERROR in the cells instead of letting the process hang forever.

It's the same thing on Android when you are switching users. How something like this can get QA is crazy to me. That is certainly not the way it's supposed to work.

Any data points on the grad students specifically? Or is it just a guess based on how the undergraduates performed?

Not saying OP did this, but one can imagine using adjectives to hint at competence or lack thereof here.

FWIW I have no dog in this race. Parent comment just got me thinking.

Is it right or wrong? Probably not great. I don't do it. But I get how it happens. Probably not nefarious, just a little tonedeaf.

I don't know, but if that's the intended question then it'd make sense to ask that (which someone else already did, so I recommend upvoting if you're interested).

The question whose point I don't get is the one I responded to. It seems absurd to ask "why did you do X but not Y?" when doing Y would've only left you more dissatisfied.

But I find it curious that why you're pressing on interrogating me like this. Why the inquisition?

But that's the thing -- is the GP's problem really the difference/inconsistency? Is that really what they're trying to highlight? If it is, then I agree, but that's what I was trying to clarify, because it seems more likely to me that making it more "consistent" could've left them unhappier.

The real weirdness is why OP thought that the front line customer service drone was a "middle manager".