Re:The software development final exam: Mathematics
by delinka on Wednesday October 10, 2012 @08:16AM
(#4635964)
"Why should a message be "padded" (and not just with zeroes) before being encrypted or signed using RSA?" I just happen to know this one. I know effective developers that don't. This is not 'basic' information.
"What is the expected run-time of quicksort? What is the worst-case run-time?" Who cares? Call the sort method on your array class, call a sort function. Done. I don't need to know this for everyday things.
"Name and describe the four states in MESI cache coherence." This is 'basic' knowledge? Maybe if I wrote a kernel in school, and if I did, I certainly don't remember the details of dealing with cache coherence 25 years later. I'm not a kernel developer now. Nor are a Very Large Percentage of developers in the real world.
"Which of the following two functions is faster, and why? Assume that the C code is translated into machine code in the obvious manner, without optimization." Again, I just happen to know this one. But the "without optimization" almost makes the exercise silly. As your employer, I'd want to know you have the analytical skills to find the bottleneck in the code or to discover the compiler bug whose optimization is causing problems.
"Explain the difference between a mutex and a read-write lock." Sorry, I'm using a higher-level construct. GCD from Apple, go routines in go ... do I 'fail' this question because I don't have to remember this from 15 years back?
"What is the expected run-time of quicksort? What is the worst-case run-time?" Who cares? Call the sort method on your array class, call a sort function. Done. I don't need to know this for everyday things.
"Name and describe the four states in MESI cache coherence." This is 'basic' knowledge? Maybe if I wrote a kernel in school, and if I did, I certainly don't remember the details of dealing with cache coherence 25 years later. I'm not a kernel developer now. Nor are a Very Large Percentage of developers in the real world.
"Which of the following two functions is faster, and why? Assume that the C code is translated into machine code in the obvious manner, without optimization." Again, I just happen to know this one. But the "without optimization" almost makes the exercise silly. As your employer, I'd want to know you have the analytical skills to find the bottleneck in the code or to discover the compiler bug whose optimization is causing problems.
"Explain the difference between a mutex and a read-write lock." Sorry, I'm using a higher-level construct. GCD from Apple, go routines in go ... do I 'fail' this question because I don't have to remember this from 15 years back?