Am I insane?

From: Joseph S. Barrera III (joe@barrera.org)
Date: Fri Jan 12 2001 - 18:14:38 PST


I interviewed a job candidate today, and I asked him
about order-n-log-n and order-n-squared and sorting.
He had no idea what I was talking about, and was a
big indignant that I would be asking him a *math*
question.

Should I not expect programmers to know computational
complexity? Should I not mind when they write n-squared
loops in the critical path because they don't know
any better?

The same guy, by the way, claimed to be a java programmer
but was totally unable to write "hello, world".
As in, he gave the class a constructor but no main
method, didn't use any public/static/etc declarations,
and used "sys.println.out" to print the "hello, world".

Disgusted,

- Joe

Joseph S. Barrera III
Software Architect, Broadbase Software
(650) 219-4557 (cell)
(650) 330-8542 (work)

God's in his heaven; all's right with the world



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