I worked on low level machine learning infrastructure and distributed algorithms at Google. I know pretty well what challenging engineering problems looks like.
> No I don't. AT ALL.
You don't think your inability to visualize computation affect your ability to come up with solutions to problems at all?
Edit:
> Your sorting algorithm will mean jackshit when you spend all your time doing I/O reading files in and out of memory for example. Your super cool distributed algorithm means nothing if you don't understand CPU P-States(I guess that's irrelevant nowadays) or NUMA and didn't setup the machine properly.
I understand those things well, it isn't hard to learn, we run benchmarks using proper prod setups and see what works faster and we know about CPU caches, memory overhead, file reading speed etc. The only difference is that I am fluent in algorithms and you aren't. I'm not sure why you'd think that I wouldn't know those thinks just because I know algorithms, it takes like a few months to master algorithms, there is still plenty of time to learn the other things.
I also had countless experiences where I ended up either rewriting from scratch or massively refactoring code that was written by computer scientists that dumped all their algorithm ideas into code without understanding a thing about performance, the underlying infrastructure or how to trace it.
Your sorting algorithm will mean jackshit when you spend all your time doing I/O reading files in and out of memory for example. Your super cool distributed algorithm means nothing if you don't understand CPU P-States(I guess that's irrelevant nowadays) or NUMA and didn't setup the machine properly.
I for one have opted out of this BS and will actively avoid mediocre programmers trying to boost their ego with cookiecutter algorithm questions.