How to Rock an Algorithms Interview

Re:How to Rock an Algorithms Interview by groby_b on Monday September 26, 2011 @06:14PM (#3040956)

Based on 20 years of experience, lack of fluency in algorithms _is_ a surefire indicator of bad architecture skills. Yes, it gives a few false positives, but the amount of false negatives is pretty much 0.

And since actually getting a new person on-board is an expensive process, you aim for criteria that are a bit too stringent, if you can afford it.

There's also the issue that making a bad algorithmic decision at the center of the problem turns scaling into an insanely hard problem, sometimes. It's not so much about learning about it when you need it, but about avoiding issues in the first place.

True, there are many places where it truly doesn't matter - but if scaling/performance matter for your company, you don't want to head down the garden path because your developers didn't know better.

Not knowing algorithms won't exclude you from all jobs (or even many of them), but there are some jobs where it _will_ bite you. It's your choice if you want to go for those jobs. Personally, I think they are where the cool stuff is happening, but YMMV.

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Re:How to Rock an Algorithms Interview by HardyLeung on Monday September 26, 2011 @06:25PM (#3040983)

I agree with jchonphoenix and groby_b. I'm sure there are a lot of great self-taught genius who don't have the formal training but does a much better job than most, but there are orders of magnitude more in the camp of "half-taught" mediocre programmers, with shiny formal training, that can easily be filtered out using this approach.

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Re:How to Rock an Algorithms Interview by mcantor on Monday September 26, 2011 @08:24PM (#3041296)

Thank you, this is an illuminating response! Hopefully I'll remember to look back on this thread when I'm enlightened so I can see if I've switched sides on the debate. :-)

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