I'm occasionally asked to give technical interviews for potential hires
here at Amazon. I had one where the kid had a CS degree from Stanford,
and an MSCS from UCSD. I asked him to write a function to reverse a
linked list. It took him 45 minutes to come up with a very ugly
solution. On the second question he decided to use Java and implemented
a stack using ArrayList, but did his pushes and pops from the front of
the list (which internally involves moving all the other elements), and
when I asked him about the performance implications with a large list,
he couldn't tell me why it was bad. What the hell did he do in those
six years of education, and how did that qualify him for a degree?
A colleague of mine argues that one shouldn't have to understand the
underlying implementation to program in a language, because a person
doesn't have to know how an engine works to drive a car. These are the
people that never change their oil. Their VCR's blink "12:00" all the
time.
The most precious thing I could ever give my kids in life it would be a
fundamental curiosity for how things work and a desire to learn. That
is obviously more important than a degree from Stanford.
He didn't get the job.
Tomy
Another grump old fart, wrote his own JVM and Lisp interpreter to
understand the languages.
On Mar 20, 2004, at 9:42 AM, Paul Schreiber wrote:
> (long URL)
>
> http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu//courses/eceprojectsland/STUDENTPROJ/
> 2002to2003/lil2/index.html
>
> I guess what depresses me is that one can get a MSEE from Cornell
> hooking
> off-the shelf sensors to input ports of a uP and write some C code.
> ARGHHH!!!!!
> FWIW, Bernie Hutchins (Electronotes) is from/still teaches at Cornell.
> Bob Moogs
> PhD is from Cornell. ARRGGGGHHHH!!!
>
> The WAV file is cute, as are the hamsters.
>
> Paul S.
> grump old fart, can still use slide rule
>
> "Both C and UNIX started as a prank/inside joke and it sorta got out
> of hand." -
> Dennis Richey
>
>
>
>
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