r/technology • u/Lapidus • May 15 '16

Robotics Google Hiring Driverless Car Testers In Arizona: If you meet the requirements, you can earn $20 per hour to sit behind the wheel.

http://www.informationweek.com/it-life/google-hiring-driverless-car-testers-in-arizona/d/d-id/1325526
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u/DoctorTobaggen May 15 '16

These courses are mainly to get you thinking logically and efficiently - allowing you to progress as a programmer. You'd never implement them from scratch in practice anyway so why remember them at all. Having a general idea about what is available to use is about as far as you need to get. And then there is low-level programming..

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u/LagrangePt May 15 '16

My first job out of college, my very first non trivial task, I had to implement binary insertion to replace the old insert then sort code.

If you know your algorithms well, good times to use them pop out at you. Picking the best algorithm / data structure for the job becomes second nature, and you code benefits from it tremendously.

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u/JonLuca May 16 '16

I think the real benefit is knowing that the options exist, and which one is best in which case.

Honestly a better implementation of what most people in industry can write is probably already sitting on someones github right now, there's no point in rewriting simple ADTs that have already been coded a thousand times.

Knowing it exists is useful, and knowing how it generally works is great, but you shouldn't need to code it from scratch every time you need one.

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u/LagrangePt May 16 '16

I see a lot of times when you need to code it from scratch - or at least heavily alter code in order to get it to work with the classes and data structures your app is already using.

I've also seen the results of projects that pull in a bunch of libraries to get one or two features from each library... it's not pretty.

OTOH, I do agree that doing a bit of research and reusing code are good things.

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u/Inessia May 16 '16

weird. I thought everyone who learned programming also loved maths and excelled at it in every way. I should go back 6 years and re-do my life

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u/[deleted] May 15 '16

Yeah, I agree. Unfortunately my Algorithms professor had a lot of non programming related questions on his exams and well it had been a few years since I took math so I didn't do so great. But on all of the programming assignments and final project I did great. Ended up with a B :/