Re:I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in s...
by nicoburns on Saturday January 19, 2019 @10:07AM
(#18947379)
> A lot of resources out there are wrong, inaccurate, or not reasonable for your particular context, and it requires a reasonable amount of algorithmic intelligence to be able to sniff out what's appropriate.
Right, and having that algorithmic intelligence is key part of me being a good developer. But testing how someone implements an algorithm in time-scarce circumstances is not a good test of that kind of intelligence because it is likely to favour people who have been exposed to that particular algorithm before (even if they only rote-learnt information about it - as many interviewees seem to do in practice) over people who have the capability to think deeply and reason correctly about it, but have not previously been exposed to that problem.
A lot of resources out there are wrong, inaccurate, or not reasonable for your particular context, and it requires a reasonable amount of algorithmic intelligence to be able to sniff out what's appropriate.
If I had a dollar for every high-upvoted SO post that misstates a problem or doesn't offer proper caveats... but I can make that judgment because I've already thought about a related problem in the past.
It's like asking why one should learn how to write properly when Grammarly and spell checkers exist, or why mental arithmetic is useful when we have calculators—at some point those your tools will be inappropriate or unavailable. Search tools are force multipliers, not replacements for personal knowledge and intuition.