Fal-Cone posted:

Just graduated two months ago in May with a B.S. in CS (No previous internships/research experience. A handful of small projects, and a 2.98 GPA), but after two months of hobbling around and applying to a handful of places, the only position I managed to snag was as a "Software Intern" at a large telecom company at $15/hr working 35/40h a week on a 6-month contract doing test automation and stuff.

Everyone else that graduated with me is either making double my expected annual income, or is still bopping around doing summer stuff. It's day five for me, here, and I'm not really digging this huge cubicle farm and the whole "worth-half-as-much-as-my-classmates thing" :ashobon:

What's the best plan in terms of trying to get a position as an actual software engineer job out there? Could I try to put the fact that I'm currently in an internship on my resume and hope it scores me some points? Or stick it out for a couple quarters or the whole six months? I mean, i'm in the SF Bay Area, it shouldn't be that difficult, right?

how!! posted:

That code took me three days to create. It represents exactly how I write code for production. Everything I write for my personal projects and for stuff at work, I strive for it to look like that. I never ever ever ever check in code that looks like tef's code. For that reason, I always feel like it's unfair when I'm given a programming challenge where I'm forced to turn in code that I'm not able to polish up the way I like. For the same reason, I hate it when my co-workers check in code thats not polished up either. Reddit did it right because they let me take as much time as I wanted. I feel proud of the code I wrote and feel confident in emailing it to them. Do you think I'm a terrible programmer because it took me three days to write that? I guess I could have gotten it done in one hour, but it would have been awful code and I would have been ashamed of myself for sending them a solution that was not as good as I am capable of creating.

how!! posted:

By the way, does anyone have a job where they're tasked with solving problems with only one hour to do it in? Since I started programming about 5 years ago, I've never had such a short amount of time to get something done. Most deadlines I deal with are on the scale of days, not minutes. Does it make me a bad programmer if I get anxious when told I need to write something complex and I only have an extremely short amount of time to complete it?

Haywood Japwnme posted:

He didn't say your code was garbage or that he didn't care about the code he writes. You are completely ignoring everyone's advice and probably aren't going to get a job at a company like Facebook if you keep up that attitude. In the workforce, you're expected to work quickly. Don't get mad at people for telling you how the real world is. You need to turn your ego down a bit and listen to to the people trying to help you get a job.

That or apply to grad school.

how!! posted:

So you're saying speed is all that matters? The advice is that I should not care about code being readable and elegant? A good programmer fixes everything in the quickest manner possible? If a problem can be fixed in 5 minutes, then spending 6 minutes is wasting time?

how!! posted:

I don't know, in my experience that line of thinking leads to really really complex code that becomes really unmaintainable really quickly. Its what I call "crap piled on top of crap, piled on top of crap, piled on top of crap"

how!! posted:

not fun work == programmers procrastinate, get frustrated and make excuses for not getting the work done

how!! posted:

So you're saying speed is all that matters? The advice is that I should not care about code being readable and elegant? A good programmer fixes everything in the quickest manner possible? If a problem can be fixed in 5 minutes, then spending 6 minutes is wasting time? I don't know, in my experience that line of thinking leads to really really complex code that becomes really unmaintainable really quickly. Its what I call "crap piled on top of crap, piled on top of crap, piled on top of crap"

elegant code == fun to work with (because you can easily run the code in your head)
complex code == not fun to work on (because you have no idea what the gently caress is going on)

not fun work == programmers procrastinate, get frustrated and make excuses for not getting the work done

Haywood Japwnme posted:

And please enlighten us with all of this experience that you keep heralding over the thread. The experience that trumps every other poster's in this thread.

how!! posted:

So far in my tech career, I've worked for 3 different companies. At each company, a pattern always emerges:

1. The company gets started
2. A bunch of inexperienced developers start writing code with little idea
3. I get hired
4. I see the code base and see incomprehensible crap that is not tested, not documented, not logical in any way, etc.
5. I make the suggestion right off the bat that it would be better, faster and more fun to just throw everything away and start again fresh.
6. Company boss / lead developer gets extremely angry and offended and tells my I'm the craziest person alive for suggesting such a thing.
7. I get frustrated and disappointed and eventually lose interest in the job until I get fired, or I find another job.

Dijkstracula posted:

How!!, I'm not sure what you want from us.

You asked whether it was unfair to ask for the GoL problem to be done in an hour, we all agreed that it was fair and doable within the time limit, and now you've spent the last page doing mental contortions to convince yourself that you're a special snowflake to whom reality doesn't apply. I think you'll find when you get out into the real world that, like it or not, having enough time to write code "the right way" is a pipe dream and never happens.

tef posted:

Python code:

import sys
import collections, itertools

lines = sys.stdin.readlines()
num = int(lines.pop(0))

for b in range(num):
    size, n= (int(x) for x in lines.pop(0).strip().split())
    old_b, new_b = [], []
    for _ in range(size):
        line = lines.pop(0).strip()
        old_b.append(line)
        new_b.append(list(line))
    for _ in range(n):
        for r in range(1, size-1):
            for c in range(1,size-1):
                grid = "".join(g[c-1:c+2] for g in old_b[r-1:r+2])
                counter = collections.Counter(grid)
                new_b[r][c]='b' if counter['b'] > counter['w'] else 'w'
        old_b = ["".join(row) for row in new_b]
    print "Board (%d)\n%s"%(b+1, "\n".join("".join(r) for r in new_b))

this is probably wrong

edit; if I had the entire hour I might do something like this for fun

Python code:

import sys, collections, itertools
lines = sys.stdin.readlines()
for n in range(int(lines.pop(0)):
    s, i = (int(x) for x in lines.pop(0).strip().split())
    b = [lines.pop(0).strip() for _ in range(s)]
    for _ in range(i):
        b = [[('b' if sum("w b".find(x)-1 for x in itertools.chain.from_iterable(\
        g[c-1:c+2] for g in b[r-1:r+2]))>0 else 'w') if 0<r<s-1 and 0<c<s-1\
        else b[r][c] for c in range(s)] for r in range(s)]
    print "Board (%d)\n%s"%(n+1, "\n".join("".join(r) for r in b))

how!! posted:

how!! posted:

pigdog posted:

I'm not a Python programmer, which may or may not be a factor, but with that in mind, a solution such as this doesn't give a good impression on your skills at all.

It looks like you're still stuck in the hacker mindset where you strive for your code to look terse, "cool" and written by a smart person who knows all the tricks of the language to make something shorter. And also takes a smart person to understand and appreciate it.

Haywood Japwnme posted:

That or apply to grad school.

baquerd posted:

I made this all for you how!!, I'm curious about your thoughts on the code.
http://ideone.com/j8TH4

Hacked together as all hell in a half hour.

Safe and Secure! posted:

Just thinking about it real quick, it seems like making a one-hour program and having someone else spend eight hours extending it later seems like a better idea than spending eight hours on it so that someone else will only have to spend two hours extending it later.

quote:

I think it's even worse if that second person thinks like you and also spends eight hours on it so that a third programmer will only have to spend a couple hours when he or she gets to work on it, unless he or she also decides to spend much more time on it so the next person in line will spend less time, unless...

shrughes posted:

I am a Python programmer, I guess, and that code's perfectly fine. Exceptionally readable, actually.

Edit: The first version, of course. The second version is only mildly silly.

Fal-Cone posted:

Just graduated two months ago in May with a B.S. in CS (No previous internships/research experience. A handful of small projects, and a 2.98 GPA), but after two months of hobbling around and applying to a handful of places, the only position I managed to snag was as a "Software Intern" at a large telecom company at $15/hr working 35/40h a week on a 6-month contract doing test automation and stuff.

Everyone else that graduated with me is either making double my expected annual income, or is still bopping around doing summer stuff. It's day five for me, here, and I'm not really digging this huge cubicle farm and the whole "worth-half-as-much-as-my-classmates thing" :ashobon:

What's the best plan in terms of trying to get a position as an actual software engineer job out there? Could I try to put the fact that I'm currently in an internship on my resume and hope it scores me some points? Or stick it out for a couple quarters or the whole six months? I mean, i'm in the SF Bay Area, it shouldn't be that difficult, right?

Cicero posted:

It's fine for readability because it's a math problem. If the variables were representing more concrete things, then naming them like "old_b" would be a terrible idea. I think that may be where some people are confused.

how!! posted:

If the next person spends 8 hours changing the code, then that means they are completely changing the way the code behaves. If that were the case, then so be it, theres no way around it.

Promethium posted:

I don't normally read Python but I thought tef's first solution was very easy to read since it did exactly what I expected out of a brute force solution.

In a quick coding / problem solving interview, I feel the goal is to impress your interviewer, not write something particularly well documented or easy to maintain. Your interviewer is the audience, not hypothetical devs looking at your code without knowing anything in advance, and the interviewer has seen many people write the same algorithm already so they know what to expect. Well-documented code has a lot of benefits but doing it in a short interview doesn't impress most programmers, especially when the documentation is about boilerplate parts of the code; what they appreciate is an elegant algorithm. I remember reading a discussion where people were debating an interview question with various approaches, tradeoffs of code complexity vs. run speed, when Peter Norvig replied with a few lines of uncommented Python. No one proposed anything after that.

how!! posted:

So you're saying speed is all that matters? << Strawman argument removed>>

quote:

elegant code == fun to work with (because you can easily run the code in your head)
complex code == not fun to work on (because you have no idea what the gently caress is going on)
not fun work == programmers procrastinate, get frustrated and make excuses for not getting the work done

how!! posted:

I disagree. In the refactoring thread I posted a while ago, someone posted a quote that went a little like "There are two ways to write code, one way is so that there are no obvious bugs, the other way is that there are obviously no bugs. The first is very easy, the second is very hard".

quote:

My problem

quote:

tef's code has 'no obvious bugs'.

quote:

When I wrote the reddit code, the process went a little like this:

quote:

edit: I admit I have the biggest ego in the world, which is why I make posts like this, hoping someday someone will say whatever they need to say to me that will convince me to not be so egotistical.

pigdog posted:

I'm not a Python programmer, which may or may not be a factor, but with that in mind, a solution such as this doesn't give a good impression on your skills at all.

quote:

It looks like you're still stuck in the hacker mindset where you strive for your code to look terse, "cool" and written by a smart person who knows all the tricks of the language to make something shorter. And also takes a smart person to understand and appreciate it.

quote:

Paraphrasing Martin Fowler from a book that's nearly 10 years old by now, "you do not write the program for the computer, but also for the next developer who gets to read it (who may be you in a couple of years)".

quote:

It takes little time, and whoever has to work with the code later will thank you.

shrughes posted:

I am a Python programmer, I guess, and that code's perfectly fine. Exceptionally readable, actually.

Edit: The first version, of course. The second version is only mildly silly.

Cicero posted:

It's fine for readability because it's a math problem. If the variables were representing more concrete things, then naming them like "old_b" would be a terrible idea. I think that may be where some people are confused.

Tres Burritos posted:

I'll hopefully graduate sometime this year and I keep tabs on this thread quite a bit. That being said, I'm almost positive that how!! is a troll. I hope.

Promethium posted:

Peter Norvig replied with a few lines of uncommented Python. No one proposed anything after that.

Maluco Marinero posted:

But how do you know your requirements in the future?

Aramoro posted:

I tend to think how!! and tef are both wrong and the real answer is somewhere in the middle

tef posted:

As you can see, I wrote it for the forums posters who get to read it.

necrobobsledder posted:

One thing that always bothered me about the code you write in interviews is that it doesn't tell you anything about what the person necessarily knows about what they think is shippable production code.

necrobobsledder posted:

2. He can see a deadlock / race condition situation

Zombywuf posted:

code:

pep8 --repeat tef.py 
tef.py:2:19: E401 multiple imports on one line
tef.py:8:12: E225 missing whitespace around operator
tef.py:15:31: E225 missing whitespace around operator
tef.py:16:29: E231 missing whitespace after ','
tef.py:16:34: E225 missing whitespace around operator
tef.py:17:35: E225 missing whitespace around operator
tef.py:19:28: E225 missing whitespace around operator
tef.py:21:27: E225 missing whitespace around operator

sigh

text editor posted:

One day I wanna give a programming interview to someone and actually validate it for pep8 compliance just to get a reaction from the interviewee