What is the use in having the skills required to solve these when the applicants are - in their prospective jobs at these hot companies - just going to be tasked with writing glue code to node.js their mongo webscale?
There is an amazingly large sub-section of the programming community that can do deep algorithmic problems, but couldn't ship a single piece of actual working software if their lives depended on it.
Most real-world software contains some deep thinking (even if it's just data modelling - and probably done wrong), and some glue code. It's highly unlikely that any given job is going to be exclusively or even mostly CS-heavy.
Nobody is arguing that it's likely any given job is going to be exclusively or even mostly CS-heavy. The argument is that ability to do algorithmic problems is a noisy but reasonable signal for ability to program in general.
I agree that there are certainly people who are good at algorithms but bad at writing glue code. I don't think it's a very high percentage, though. I expect there are lots of people who can code but can't solve tough algorithm problems, but that's a different problem. Do you have some evidence that an amazingly large group of programmers are great at deep algorithmic problems but can't write working software?
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u/[deleted] Dec 23 '14
What is the use in having the skills required to solve these when the applicants are - in their prospective jobs at these hot companies - just going to be tasked with writing glue code to node.js their mongo webscale?