Re:A computer science study plan to become a software engineer
by sidlls on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @03:34PM
(#25448218)
At Google & Co. you might need this stuff, but 99.9% of the other engineers at Google & Co. don't. Source: me, as I work at "& Co.", who employs numerous ex-Google staff, and have friends in other "& Co."s, etc.
What Google & Co.'s engineers do is gatekeep. Sometimes it's out of ignorance, sometimes out of inappropriate generalization of their roles to others, and sometimes out of a deep angst caused by working in roles that effectively make almost all their CS-specific trivia next to useless in practice.
Yes, because at Google & Co. you actually NEED this stuff. I am not sure there is a day going by where being strong in math and computer science isn't immensely helpful for my job.
The problem is: All other companies immitate Google, not only through interviews, but also by copying their "scalability" which is completely crazy. For instance relational databases are perfectly fine for like 99% of companies. Single servers would probably work well for another 90% of companies. Monoliths instead of micro services would work well for 90% of companies... It's crazy.