Re:America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away
by QuercusMax on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @04:08PM
(#18295883)
If you're applying for a job as a full-time software developer, you should be able to write something that is comprehensible without having a syntax reference.
I straight-up tell people I don't care if you use the wrong method name (in Python is it ends_with() or endswith? toupper, to_upper, or upcase?). Heck, I even tell them I don't care what language it is as long as it's not too weird.
A few months back I interviewed someone who was currently employed as a software engineer at a major company in Silicon Valley, who couldn't even figure out how to write a tiny little program which kept track of state across method calls. I told him that he could store the state in global variables, make an object to track the state, or anything else he wanted; still couldn't make any progress outside creating a single stateless function. I was truly puzzled.
I am sure that any CS major couos write fizz buzz, on their computer, for the purpose of their homework assignment or whatever.
Whether or not they can do the same thing, in 15 minutes, on a whiteboard in front of someone is a different story.
The moral of this story is that writing code, on a blank slate, while having to have all the syntax memorized, and having everything conpile without having access to a compiler, is a real skill that many people haven't even attempted to do.