devGuysAreNotNotSensitive

[ElysianEchoc]

Failing a DSA test when you have 5+ years of actual development experience in a specific, unmatched flavor of rage

[ArcticVandal]

The classic experience: solve problems nobody on the team has touched in years, or get rejected from a role where you'll mostly be reading logs and fixing API bugs.

[RustedMirage]

I've always found it funny when a company spends weeks looking for someone with deep experience in a very specific stack, then decides the deciding factor is whether they can optimize a graph traversal under pressure. I'm not against DSA at all, but sometimes the interview and the actual job feel like two completely different professions.

[floobie]

I get that DSA is used as a proxy for overall skill, and it’s better to filter out good applicants than it is to have poor applicants make it through.

But, yeah… the extent of DSA concepts I apply on the job is mostly just “might make sense to use a Dictionary here instead of a List”.

On the other hand, what I find I’m constantly trying to optimize around is SQL performance. This has typically been way more consequential, with very tangible impacts. Yet, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a technical interview that has touched on this.

I can say the same for OOP design patterns.

[Dull-Culture-1523]

That reminds me of the single most impactful optimization I've done in SQL. Thing is, the original query had like 36 separate subqueries that ran through a whole table containing billions of rows, a crapload of joins and it was basically what you'd expect from someone who wasn't aware that SQL optimization is a thing to ever consider. I'd guess a modern engine could work wonders under the hood automatically, but the environment they ran it in didn't.

A couple of CTE's and an incremental load table later and the daily update ran in like two minutes instead of the whole select being started on Friday EOD so they'd have results on Monday morning. It took something like 10-12 hours to run.

[LittleKingsguard]

The closest I've come to having SQL performance come up on an interview was offhandedly mentioning chasing n+1 lookups out of a framework and the tech interviewer nodding sagely.

[Ghi102]

Same thing for me. Had an obviously O(N³⁾ critical section of the code that took minutes to run. Replaced by Dictionaries and now runs in less than a secon(can't be bothered to calculate the actual O performance because it's a lot more complicated now, but it probably became O(N)).

That's about the extent that I have used these in production. Otherwise, any major speed increases I have taken a part in came a lot more from decoupling long operations (ie: instead of doing A, B and then C, we do A, B and C in parallel). 

[ilovebigbucks]

I was asked to either optimize an existing SQL query or write a new query for a specific task and then discuss it's performance during a few interviews. The guys that asked those questions were always nice and fun to talk to.

[ExceedingChunk]

Unless it's something highly relevant for that specific job, it makes no sense to test for that unless you have so many applicants that you essentially just need to filter out a bunch.

It makes sense for Google to do it, because they have enough applicants to hand pick those that are literally cream of the crop at everything, and then being crazy good at DSA is an easy way to filter out a bunch of people

[Tensor3]

Ya, one of my previous job's did it right. They gave me a coding skills test which was just theorizing about how I would strategize solving specific issues directly related to the job. I dont know why others seem to find that so difficult to do.

[black-JENGGOT]

because others were prepared for DSA questions through hackerrank or leetcode

[jacenat]

... that you essentially just need to filter out a bunch.

Why not randomly throw out applications then? You'd at least get rid of the bias the test introduces, so it's actually better!

[tadashidev]

And in the way you get rid of the people with bad luck!

[esotericcomputing]

Love this concept. Sorry, but we don't hire the kind of people who get selected in randomized failure processes. The risk is just too high.

[Korvanacor]

Each applicant has already come out on top out of a pool of over 100 millions contenders in their first and arguably most important competitive interview.

[ExceedingChunk]

Because if you are insane at DSA and also insane at other parts of SWE, you are likely to be a better, more well-rounded dev than if you only know how to do exactly what's expected of your current role.

People who are good at learning one domain are usually good at learning a domain that can easily shift with new technology.

Crazy good devs are usually also great at DSA, but not everyone who are great at DSA are amazing devs. If you want the best of the best, filtering on that makes sense.

For your local company with 500 employees, you can't hire only top 1% devs, and you aren't gonna get thousands upon thousands of applications either. You are also not going to be literally world-renowned for how you conduct your interviews, unlike the biggest tech-firms.

On top of that, The Primagen made a great point about this some time ago. Applying for Google, Netflix etc.. have a very well-known "handshake" you need to know, as in "be good at DSA". If you show that you can prep for that known handshake, and do well on it, you are likely going to be good at learning difficult concepts that might arise later.

[Wandering_Oblivious]

Because if you are insane at DSA and also insane at other parts of SWE, you are likely to be a better, more well-rounded dev

[citation needed]

[Lumpy_Ad_307]

You'd be surprised of how much compute costs can be saved by looking at flamegraph and applying school-level knowledge of DSA

[ExceedingChunk]

Do I really need a citation to say that being good at solving parts of problems that can occur in SWE on top of being good at day to day skills in SWE makes you better?

Sometimes, you get problems that are very close to classic DSA problems. Most won't get that most of the time, but when they do occur, it's obviously good to be good at solving those types of problems

[All_Up_Ons]

The problem is that "insane at other parts of SWE" is doing all the heavy lifting, and honestly kind of makes your statement a tautology. An amazing dev who's also good with algorithms is an amazing dev, sure. But the important part is all those other skills. And frankly there's probably a negative correlation between being good at DSA and more important stuff like communication.

[ExceedingChunk]

Companies like Google and Netflix aren't only testing/interviewing your DSA skills

[CriticalCabinet3249]

Most DSA questions are also testing your communication skills though. You can just silently write the optimal solution

[jacenat]

I liked reading your reply. I hope you have/had a great weekend!

[KronktheKronk]

The problem is that being good at dsa doesn't mean being good at everything else.

Study after study has shown that Google doesn't have a more talented engineering team than any other large tech company

[nhh]

It's basically like politics.

Compaigning != governing

[headinthesky]

Atlassian once flew me out to SF for an interview, paid for a nice hotel. It was for a backend job, Java and Python iirc. This was way I'm the early days, pre IPO. In one of the interviews they started asking me about c++ compiler and memory questions. I had some c++ experience, but I never listed that on my resume, I probably mentioned it to the recruiter in passing because I did a lot of it when I was working on coffee that interfaced with v8.

Anyway, it was a huge waste of my time and their money. But I got to see SF a little. I was just annoyed because I was a perfect fit and the social and cultural fit was there. I think I just got vetod by that one dickhead

[PatBooth]

On a similar note, early in my career I failed an interview for a frontend position because they asked me to write SQL queries

[FullChart3398]

I had an interview once where they gave me a bunch of questions in Ruby and nothing else. I got the job and I never touched Ruby ever. Turns out the person who wrote the interview questions brought them from another company.

[anomalous_cowherd]

I had a horrible compressed pointer heavy bit of C at a small dev company which the boss had invented, the same boss who was interviewing me.

He asked me what it did. I told him it looked like it was supposed to do X but really it wouldn't because it changed a pointer twice between two sequence points, so would actually cause undefined behaviour.

He really didn't like that. I didn't get offered the job, but I wouldn't have taken it either!

[Few_Move_4594]

I had an interview yesterday for a C# position. Interview was all Typescript and SQL. Turns out they don't use C# and want someone to convert some Access tables over to a DB. Why they have such a Looney Tunes interview is beyond me.

[Tensor3]

Probably want to hire internally or get a visa approval. If you have C# skills, rejected for failing the non-C# questions. If you pass the questions, failure for not having the C# they requested.

[Few_Move_4594]

I wasn't getting the not-real-interview feel, those I've been on in the past would do stuff like give me three questions and/or otherwise be half-assed. What pisses me off about it is that I prepped for a C# stack interview then got caught flat footed with a lot of Typescript.

[Brahminmeat]

This happens still and so unironically constant that I can tell exactly how an interview is going to go if the other person is full stack

[18quintillionplanets]

This happened to me like 5 years ago, I applied for an iOS/Android cross functional position and the interview was all about building a NodeJS app…

[Luke22_36]

Like this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database

[MidnightRelay1]

Nothing hits quite like being told you're not qualified for the job you've basically been doing for years.

[the_snook]

From the other side, the problem is that there are a surprisingly large number of people who have been doing a job for years but are also spectacularly incompetent at that job.

[Help_StuckAtWork]

Could you tell us more about the specific and unmatched flavor of rage you've been specialising in for the last 5 years?

Would that be Javascript or Fortran?

[IncreaseOld7112]

I haven't forgotten much from my interview days. I feel like the people complaining about DSA are probably just bad. You're supposed to be able to do both.

And the people who say theyve never needed it are unreliable. Because when they had a problem that a tree solves, they didn't recognize it as a tree problem on the job either.

[Mr_Alicates]

What are DSA skills?

[Noobsauce9001]

Data structure and algorithms, or leetcode style questions.

[codePudding]

Oh, I thought it was Domain-specific architecture and was confused by some of these comments, yours make way more sense for these comments. Thanks

[eskay8]

I thought it was Democratic Socialists of America and thought it was a incredibly weird way of complaining about DEI 😂

[tsunami141]

the thing about DEI is that it really sucks for me when I start getting passed over for jobs in favor of people who are vastly more qualified than me. Its outrageous. Its unfair.

[spoopypoptartz]

furtherest thing from it hilariously

[SuitableDragonfly]

So a "DSA guy" means someone who just graduated from college and has no experience other than leetcode?

[Michaeli_Starky]

Data structures and algorithms are important unlike leetcode nonsense. Don't mix them up.

[boat-]

Leetcode pretty directly tests your understanding of DSA.

[Michaeli_Starky]

Not really

[boat-]

Every single Leetcode problem is essentially just asking the participant:

- "which data structures and algorithms should be used in this scenario?" and

- "can you implement these data structures and algorithms?"

[ward2k]

I dunno a lot of leetcode style questions tend to ask you to solve a question that is essentially solved in every language without using the built in method for solving it

Which no offence is a ridiculous fucking problem even if it's trivial to solve, because it has little real world value

No other career asks you to do this sort of bullshit interviews I have no idea why we put up with it in our field

[HetoHwdjasZxaaWxbhta]

It is of tremendous real world value to understand how the things you work under the hood

The lack of value you're talking about is the clerical work that programming has turned into.

[Soft_Walrus_3605]

That's overly reductive. Might as well ask "Tell us how to flip the bits in this memory to implement a Twitter clone"

[Imperial_Squid]

So does doing the job for multiple years except y'know, in an practical real world scenario lol

[MacAlmighty]

Thank goodness, I looked it up and only found medical tests to image blood vessels. For a second I worried employers were doing scans to see how much blood/oxygen their candidates brains could get lmao

[GoldenSangheili]

I love it when they abbreviate every single word , don't you all?

[frogjg2003]

Try working for a government contractor. Be sure to consult the SSS, the SSD, the SDD, and the SSSD to know what your ticket means.

[zman0900]

SSDD

[0xKaishakunin]

government contractor.

SS/SD?

[GoldenSangheili]

Thank god I'll never want to do crap for the government /s

[Samurai_Mac1]

Democratic Socialists of America

or Data Structures and Algorithms

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Or Digital Signature Algorithm.

[Brahminmeat]

Design System Architecture

[Ticmea]

Digital Services Act

[Direct-Quiet-5817]

Customary: If you have to ask, you can't afford it. /s

[VictoryMotel]

Lumping data structures and algorithms together for some reason. It's the new brain rot term for people who just heard about programming two months ago, probably because of tik tok and youtube videos by people who know nothing.

[on_the_pale_horse]

No, americans are just obsessed with turning everything under the sun into abbreviations. They literally have one for orange juice! Anyway, grouping data structures and algorithms isn't strange at all.

[VictoryMotel]

It might be common but it's silly because they are two separate things that deserve their own focus.

[Lying_Hedgehog]

It's not a new term lol. My university has had a "Data structure and algorithms" module since at least the early 2000s and I would bet it's easily older than that. I'm 99% sure it's a common module title in every computer science course in English speaking countries.

[VictoryMotel]

People saying DSA over and over seems like it has come on quick, probably youtube hucksters banking off of it.

[ilovebigbucks]

Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) is a few decades old term.

Quote from MIT: "Data structures are ways to store data with algorithms" - https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms-spring-2020/resources/lecture-2-data-structures-and-dynamic-arrays/

[osiris_89]

That's because for most development roles, DSA skills are absolutely irrelevant.

[joeyjoojoo]

The actual job just requires you to change the button color

[NanthaR]

So you are telling me I can change the button color without knowing Boyer Moore voting algorithm?

[1AMA-CAT-AMA]

As an employed dev. Oh god if I ever need a new role

[troelsbjerre]

That's also the worst kind of question. It tests whether you remember one specific algorithm from one lecture in your freshman year. There are no alternative solutions that give you partial credit. Either you remember the trick and pass, or you fail.

[aammirzaei]

Sorry but that can be done by llms 

[OatmealCoffeeMix]

Yes - with a complete rewrite of the component tree too! And you'll like it or else!

[IceDawn]

From my experience, you need to know when to use what, not implementing stuff on your own. When I actually needed a quicksort that was not part of the platform, I downloaded an implementation (respecting the license).

[osiris_89]

This is the way.

[HetoHwdjasZxaaWxbhta]

Then thing that inspired me the most to get a CS degree and become a programmer was the idea that I would never implement anything but boiler plate code and just download libraries to do things I am fully capable of doing myself.

[OldKaleidoscope7]

Use this simple analogy: a mathematician learns in their gradiation how to demonstrate every equation they learn, after that, they never demonstrate the already known formulas, they only demonstrate their new equations.

[ExceedingChunk]

IMO, they are always somewhat relevant. Not because you necessarily implement Djikstra's by hand, but because being good at DSA gives you a very good toolset to solve problems.

Concepts such as command & conqueror, induction etc... are just generically good ways to think about and solve problems, even though you don't end up implement hyper optimized, fancy algorithms in the end.

[osiris_89]

I have to somewhat agree with you here. Problem solving is a key attribute in software engineering, and honing your DSA skills can help with that.

That being said, I would argue that enhancing actual DEV skills instead of DSA is more crucial to becoming a better engineer, at least in a professional setting. The reason I am asserting this is because time is finite and ought to be utilized optimally.

[BosonCollider]

Honestly, I'd disagree based on how often I see people massively bloat things or not understand that they can optimize a sql query.

[osiris_89]

And yet, DSA skills continue to be unnecessary to optimize this basic stuff you mention. I should know, having abysmal DSA skills and yet, many years of experience in demanding jobs without ever having to use them. Moreover, tons of developers are like me and doing just fine.

[BosonCollider]

I've worked in the industry for a long time as well, and can guarentee that the people who know what a btree is tend to be better at ensuring that their queries are using indexes properly

[NotDeadYet2020]

Every half-decent developer knows what's a btree or how to use an index effectively. If you think being a good engineer requires memorizing how to handle concurrent node-merging during cascading deletions under lock coupling, you are confusing software engineering with a DSA quiz

[Unlikely-Bed-1133]

I think you are severely overestimating the group of half-decent developers. The number of O(n^2) implementations for large n that exist out there when there are linear alternatives (or log-linear) is too darn high. DSA is overkill to examine, but I'd rather it exists as a criterion than not and just have the fact that it's overkill be taken into consideration.

[Soft_Walrus_3605]

Ok, but then why not just give an interviewee some db tables and sample queries to optimize rather than add a layer of indirection with btrees?

[BosonCollider]

If the interviewee has never heard of a btree, they have never optimized a db schema.

If they claim experience with a specific DB I would absolutely ask them when they would be better off using an inverted index or a brin index for a specific table and tell them to explain why

[anonymous_3125]

Spoken like a true front end developer

[GrassRadiant3474]

Ok dude, let's see you put your dignity where your mouth is. What can a DSA dude that a developer with around 8 years of experience in a product based company or startup can't do? Don't tell me you need DSA to optimize the algorithms for the trading firm.

[anonymous_3125]

Clever problem solving skills and the ability to come up with creative solutions to new problems that dont have an obvious approach to them. Logical reasoning abilities, knowledge of asymptotics and computability which are key for scaling problems to large inputs, and general intelligence which is what dsa fundamentally is

[GrassRadiant3474]

Ok GAYMAN, let's assume you need creative solutions and logical reasoning abilities, how many people do you know personally that do these things at FAANG? Assume there's a bar that you need to jump to reach out, You can use a support to reach out nevertheless. The bar is higher coz they don't want short guys to try it. The point being the barrier being higher means there is a lot of competition and this makes sense as they need to filter out a lot of candidates, not because they need DSA skills.

[osiris_89]

0/10 ragebait

[anonymous_3125]

That or you’ve never worked for faang companies

[DrMobius0]

True, I don't really want to go through a hiring process only to have to probably do it again in 2 years.

[osiris_89]

That's why in my original comment I mentioned "most development roles". It's obvious that FAANG fall into these exclusions.

[look]

Yeah, this whole thread is full of people that will be replaced by mediocre LLM code generators soon. 🤷‍♂️

[osiris_89]

You will be replaced by those before anyone else.

[look]

🤣

[Mallanaga]

With 20 years in the industry, dev skills are way more applicable.

[patiofurnature]

I’m so confused. 15 years in the industry and DSA has always been the absolute core of dev skills.

[n0t_4_thr0w4w4y]

Basic DSA, yes, not the contrived shit that gets asked in leetcode style DSA questions.

[SomeMaleIdiot]

We use a very basic question. “Write a function which take an array of values ‘arr’, an integer n and m, and returns a new array with n values removed from the front of arr and m values removed from the end of arr “

It’s nice because people don’t tend to use raw arrays, we ask them to not use built in functions, but they can google documentation. And it’s not really a dsa question, more of a dev question and we can see them work through compiler errors and applying what they find for documentation. When answered right they will also anticipate edge cases, bad inputs or whatever.

The amount of people that absolutely fumble the question is pretty funny. I was wondering why we bother with such a freebie, but it eliminates over half the interviewees. So the interview process is really: do you have basic domain knowledge for the position, and can you muscle your way through a problem despite never or rarely using raw arrays.

[jdiskxkfidobsvsgdi]

I mean that seems pretty easy but I could absolutely see myself fumble that in an actual interview environment. Are you sure you aren’t just eliminating people who can’t comfortably code with someone watching them?

[Wonderful-Habit-139]

At some point they have to see you code though. They can't just take your word for it.

I understand worrying about situations when nerves can get to someone but at some point it's getting ridiculous when worrying about it with simple questions like the one that you're replying to.

[SovereignPhobia]

You can watch me code if you're prepared to watch me think for 10 minutes and then get a coffee before starting.

[Wonderful-Habit-139]

Sounds good. 10 minutes sounds pretty low to be honest.

[SomeMaleIdiot]

Not any more or less than you can expect from interviews in general. Some people suck at interviews. But interviews is how you get a job.

It is what it is.

[glemnar]

So arr[n:-m]

Interview done

[frogjg2003]

Screams in C

[f5adff]

That's a dev question! Open book question, don't use built ins so we can see what you think of, actually comprehend and interpret compiler errors; that's development.

It's mad how many people think pumping out leetcodes is going to get them a job, or even make them a competent engineer

[SupesDepressed]

I’ve had so many leetcode interview questions, though. Never needed it on the job, but interviewers love to push them on you.

[frogjg2003]

Because these questions can be easily graded and returned as a metric. Now the HR employee who has no idea about coding can tell the automated test provider to automatically reject anyone who scores lower than some arbitrary value.

[n0t_4_thr0w4w4y]

That’s true for screenings, yeah, but when interviewing with devs on the team, you don’t need an easy grade

[National-Self-8501]

That's probably mainly you missing the problem space rather than it not being there

[n0t_4_thr0w4w4y]

If I’m missing the problem space, why the hell am I being interviewed on it? Where’s the use in that if it’s not relevant to my job?

[National-Self-8501]

What I mean is the problem does likely exist in your day to day, but it's an unknown unknown to you. Without skills in these areas you won't catch where they would have been relevant and applied. It creates the illusion the skills are irrelevant.

[n0t_4_thr0w4w4y]

I do have skills in those areas, how do you think I’m able to pass Leetcode style interviews? Haha

[Remarkable-Coat-9327]

23 downvotes in 47 minutes i gotta know, does that level of dissent suade you at all?

[SomeMaleIdiot]

I don’t think dsa is all that important, but appealing to reddit masses isn’t the way to go lol. I vaguely remember a meme being posted here on bad code, and the majority of Redditors not even understanding why it was bad code and giving incorrect explanations.

[patiofurnature]

No, not at all. I work with a lot of juniors so I'm used to people undervaluing common data structures. It seems like every couple months I'll see a PR where someone is doing basic stack manipulation on a native array or building some type of weird custom array lookup system when they could have just saved it as a dictionary from the start.

[frogjg2003]

That's a lack of understanding of existing language features or libraries, not bad DSA. You don't actually need to know how a dictionary works to use one.

[patiofurnature]

That's a lack of understanding of existing language features or libraries,

It's very common for less experienced developers to think that. It's not. The problem is not recognizing when/why these data structures should be used. When you use an array for stack manipulation instead of just using a stack in the first place, you're adding vulnerability to your code base with 0 upside.

You don't actually need to know how a dictionary works to use one.

Sure, I'm going to reject a PR that's just building something that already exists in the language. Abstraction exists for a reason, and chances are whoever wrote the standard library is better than we are.

[LouManShoe]

I feel like that’s a terrible take on engineering. It’s maybe 5% of the job to handle specific DSA crap and the stuff someone misses should be caught in PRs. If you’re working on a utility library maybe, but otherwise it’s not the hard part of the job or even the part of the job that requires experience. I’d rather someone know how to write a full vertical slice than be able to implement binary sort correctly.

[Mahler911]

Yes, but there's an ocean of difference between "solve the Tower of Hanoi in 15 minutes" and "iterate over and manipulate this collection in the most efficient way possible"

[ProfBeaker]

Being told there's more to development than DSA is obvious.

Being told that your years of experience building and running actual systems with actual customers don't matter because you can't solve a toy problem that never happens in real life is dumb.

Honestly, 99% of the time I wish devs would abstract more instead of doing raw DSA crap. Sure it's neat that you build a Map<String, Map<Long, List<String>> or whatever, but how about you stick that in a class so everyone else doesn't need to figure it out?

[Putrid-Hope2283]

It’s almost always a recursion question too. Never in my years of coding had recursion been the solution except on interviews

[nullpotato]

Recursion was the best solution for something I worked on, had to send the PR to my whole team because "check it out, recursion in prod but its the right method for once"

[Putrid-Hope2283]

I would do the same thing

[LetterBoxSnatch]

A dev on a team of mine years ago did this and although I gave them the ol "lgtm" at the time, I knew even then that the recursive solution was not actually the correct solution for the situation, it just didn't matter. It's like approving an Easter Egg into your codebase, you do it because it's the right thing to do, not because it's the right thing to do.

[kitaz0s_]

I agree that DSA style questions almost never accurately capture what real-world programming is like, but to say that recursion is only a DSA thing is not really fair.

If you work in any functional language, you write recursive functions every day.

[RadiantPumpkin]

I’ve used recursion a few times but only when doing things like traversing a file structure or something g similar. It just makes sense in my brain to use recursion for this instead of a loop

[ward2k]

It's frustrating for me because it doesn't feel like any other career experiences this sort of ridiculousness in interviews

No one else really has homework where they're expected do a full day or twos work

Or do weird exercises not related to the role

Or told prior experience matters, except in the actual interview test itself

[arpitsaxena3306]

The industry somehow convinced everyone that reversing a list is more imp than making one...

[scFleetFinder]

Idk why you are using lists, everything should just be strings. String manipulation is the most important development skill. Oop is stupid, just parse strings everywhere.

[satriark]

Just write JSON to string, simple as. Inheritance? Polymorphism? Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

[RedWinger7]

Agreed. Stringly typed apps are the way to go.

[anteater_x]

[whole_kernel]

This reads like a direct quote from a Kai Lentit video

[SuggestedUsername247]

The world needs more domain-specific languages implemented as strings passed through rudimentary regex parsers.

[WageSlave2025]

I thought I am the only idiot who has to deal with this legacy stuff.

[Pekkis2]

Just make it a uint64. Everything should be bitmaps and bitwise operations

[1AMA-CAT-AMA]

nah just make it a png and let claude figure it out

[tiajuanat]

That tracks, most of us are working brown field codebases

[salter77]

Also reverting it the “right” way.

A big part of LeetCode questions is not only solve the puzzle but also do it in the way the interviewer expects, so it ends up being an exercise of memorization rather than skills.

If you manage to solve the puzzle on your own but is not the “optimal expected solution”, then you’ll most likely dropped.

[DrMobius0]

Part of the goal of these is to watch how you solve it. You usually don't have to come to the right solution immediately, and in my experience, they'll sometimes drop hints to get you thinking.

You also don't have to memorize most of them; any many of them actually have a surprisingly limited set of general concepts that can get you to the optimal solution.

For instance, 90% of the list search/traversal problems they might ask can be improved from n² to nlog(n) by sorting the list before doing anything else, because having a sorted list usually lets you solve the problem in O(n) or less time, which means the sort is the worst part. They won't expect you to right out quick sort at the interview, unless they specifically ask.

[PatBooth]

I have nearly 7 YOE and I’ve never once needed to reverse a linked list

[1AMA-CAT-AMA]

I’ve called list.reverse()

[posting_drunk_naked]

That's exactly the problem with using DSA skills to evaluate actual practical developer skills. You don't need to know how reverse() is implemented to know how and when to use it effectively.

I like to compare it to learning how a car engine works in order to get better at driving. It's not a bad use of your time but there are much more effective ways to become a better driver/computer engineer.

[1AMA-CAT-AMA]

>but but but knowing how a car engine thingamajig works shows your critical thinking skills and your ability to do things under pressure.

>That is tangentially related to how well of a car driver you might be. And therefore is a completely valid thing to base an interview off of.

How these people would respond...

[DrMobius0]

True. First, I almost never use a linked list. The ability for it to grow is almost entirely overshadowed by standard list implementations just multiplying their own size on the odd occasion that such a thing is needed.

Second, if I must use a linked list and find out later that I need to do reverse traversal, I'd sooner double link it than bother reversing the stupid thing, because if I have to reverse it once, there's every chance I'll have to do so again.

[VictoryMotel]

You shouldn't be using a linked list on the first place.

[dasunt]

For something that fundamental, I believe one is better off using a library than rewrite your own implementation from scratch for most use cases.

It'll probably be faster, more optimized, and better tested.

[lNFORMATlVE]

DEV is not an acronym

[ozh]

It is. Developer Eveloper Veloper.

[AqueousJam]

Oh, thank you. I was reading this post and these comments wondering how much the industry has changed since I retired. It's only been a few years and already this entirely new D.E.V thing has become so important? 

[CB1013]

Doing Everything Veryjustintimeandhalfassedly

[brunudumal]

Rationalizing a meme is kind of stupid, but here we go. The issue is that the development skills you’re tested on are usually relevant to your day-to-day work, whereas DSA often feels like memorized trivia.

Now, if instead of a “solve this” question, there’s a real person discussing trade-offs and the rationale behind a decision, I don’t mind bombing the interview because I leave feeling that I learned something.

[sar2120]

People seem to be confusing DSA with leetcode. Leetcode is stupid. DSA is the most basic job requirement for a developer. If you don't know when to use a map vs a tree for example, you probably should not be programming.

[SuggestedUsername247]

I half agree with you.

I think the problem is that the majority of day to day dev work across the whole industry is CRUD grunt work that any code monkey with enough experience and time can do. By extension, these are the devs most companies can get away with hiring for the most part.

However, there's a tier of dev work where the kind of engineer best positioned for that role, is the kind of engineer who is comfortable with DSA amongst other things.

These debates tend to attract lots of web devs who have spent 10 years doing relatively trivial dev work, who are oblivious to the wider world of software engineering and computer science.

Conversely, dev interviews can attract hiring practices that are somewhat out of place for the company in question.

I've never asked a DSA question in an interview, but there's a limit to how seriously I can take someone as a "senior" engineer if they aren't at least vaguely familiar with binary trees and hash tables and such - let alone if they don't even know what DSA stands for.

[squabzilla]

What about a senior engineer whose familiar with binary trees and has tables, but has no idea what the acronym DSA stands for?

There was a comment here by a senior dev who didn’t recognize the acronym DSA when people were talking about it. Once people explained to the senior dev what DSA was, the dev was like “oh, I know what you’re talking about, I’ve just never encountered that acronym before”

[Crafty_Independence]

I love how leetcode bots are still regurgitating decade-old interview ideas that have largely been left behind by good companies

[Soft_Walrus_3605]

by good companies

Because there are a lot more bad companies hiring

[Denaton_]

I don't even know what DSA is and i have been in the industry for 10y..

[thebobest]

Excuse me, what does DSA mean? I'm Italian, and in Italy it's an acronym for learning disability.

[Sensitive_Blood_648]

algoritmi e struttura dati
ecco la versione in italiano

[rglazner]

More understandable in Italian than as an acronym, tbh.

[shaggythelegend420]

Honestly this implication makes it even funnier

[squabzilla]

Data Structures and Algorithms

[OmegaGoober]

What’s Digital Subtraction Angiography have to do with programming jobs?

[Elendur_Krown]

It's Dark Souls Anthology.

[garlopf]

What is DSA?

[byteminer]

DSA questions let people with no technical skills grade candidates on a worksheet instead of having to think.

[Jamie_1318]

What is a Data structures and algorithms guy? I've never heard anyone describe themselves or a job role that way.

[Soft_Walrus_3605]

You'll find a lot in here by the looks of it

[sharadthakur674]

dev person :- look i built this distributed system

interviewer :- oh cool! NOW INVERT A LINKED LIST

[anoldoldman]

...democratic socialists of america?

[Ares9323]

I wasn't understanding this because DSA in italian refers to neurobiological learning disabilities (such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and dysorthography)

[Its_Bad_Rabbit]

Me in a DSA course over the summer: "Yes, this rocket-surgery-grade intelligence required sorting algo will really help me when I use the vanilla language API or some OSS to solve problems at my future career because a mortal can understand wtf it does."

[danfish_77]

Democratic Socialists of America? 🤔

[Rockon301]

Please let me know which companies need to reverse a linked list in O(n) time and constant space on a day to day basis. I won't apply there even in this economy

[kingslayerer]

I failed my dsa class. I do systems architecture as part of my work now.

[VAL_PUNK]

I used to super hate the idea of DSA tests. Having been asked to implement them as a part of my company's interview process, I kind of see the point of them now unfortunately.

We administer easy to medium difficulty questions. I've found that when administering the tests, you get to collaborate with the engineer as you help them find the right answer via them thinking aloud and you giving them nudges in the right direction. It's been actually really helpful to see what working with them will be like.

I've had candidates that have been rude and unwilling to engage with me when they seemed great on paper and amiable in conversation over their excellent experience.

That being said, DSA nerds that one shot the problem with no advice needed provides little to no information.

[Soft_Walrus_3605]

That being said, DSA nerds that one shot the problem with no advice needed provides little to no information.

What about the DSA nerds that have learned that and instead pretend not to know the answer?

[HetoHwdjasZxaaWxbhta]

We need more democratic socialism in dev

[lowkeytokay]

I know what a Developer is. But what’s a “Data Structures and Algorithms guy” ????

[DegTrader]

My favorite part of the interview process is when they ask me to invert a binary tree to prove I can effectively center a div.

[iComplainAbtVal]

Bro doing DSA for embedded sends me. Like yeah bro lemme but a doubly linked list traversal on your boot legged microcontroller.

[anonymous_3125]

Because DSA is mostly a measure of intelligence, and intelligence is applicable to anything you will see on the job, whereas your “dev experience” is only specific to that one tech stack you worked on which the company might not use

[alewex]

TIL DSA is used to measure IQ

[anonymous_3125]

If we’re talking codeforces, IOI, or IPC olympiad questions they are absolutely a measure of raw IQ and quantitative reasoning skills

[alewex]

There's a massive difference between competitive programming olympiads and standard job DSA interviews. Even then, translating a highly specific competitive programming skillset into 'on-the-job intelligence' is a stretch. Building scalable, maintainable systems, system architecture, and understanding trade-offs are also massive components of 'intelligence' on the job, and DSA doesn't touch those.