Re: not enough real programmers?

[Anders.X.Thulin@telia.se (Anders Thulin)]

In article <7omre4$lbh$1@fcnews.fc.hp.com>, Dennis Clark <dlc@fc.hp.com> wrote:

>  This goes a long way towards understanding the poor state of affairs in
>our CS world.  "Prove you're a programmer - hack out some code off the top
>of your head".

  It seems perfectly reasonable.  If that is the only thing that will
convince them that you're a programmer, that that's it.

  Proof are always related to the person who wants to be convinced.
Whether it's the time and place to tell the interviewer that he has
the wrong ideas is another question.

  A good interviewer probably would hope for something like it, and
put questions that were incompletely specified, or contradictory, or
lead to unneccessarily expensive solutions (in terms of space or
time).

  The first question (move zeroes) can be solved in several ways that
questions the specification -- like: first count the number of zeroes,
and then just zero out that number of elements in the array.

  To a programmer/coder that does the job (with the possible exception
of the requirement of speed); to someone else it's just not following
instructions.

  There's no clear reason why the interviewer shouldn't be tested a
little as well ...

-- 
Anders Thulin     Anders.X.Thulin@telia.se      013-23 55 32
Telia ProSoft AB, Teknikringen 6, S-583 30 Linkoping, Sweden