Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "I am a Bad Software Engineer | Prime Reacts" video.

  1. I have MSc and have been writing code professionally for a couple of decades and still I had to look up with sentential database is. From cursory look it seems to be generic form of relational database where the relations also include recursion and collation. Seems to be closer to pure mathematics than practical programming. However, if you can understand sentential database you're easily smart enough to figure out big-O notation.
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  2. I still think that everybody with CS degree should have learned Assembly as mandatory part of their education. You're not expected to use it on daily basis but you should definitely understand how some simple C code is related to Assembly. Without that level of understanding, you cannot write high performance code except by accident because you don't understand how the system works.
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  3. 13:00 Most of the time, the problem is interviewer skills. Creating a plan for an interview to meaningfully differentiate bad developers from good developers is really hard. Leave that to HR department and you'll see failure with ~100% probability. The hardest task I can imagine in an interview is a task where you're given some code (say 50–100 lines) without type definitions and ask the interviewee to explain the data structures used and to tell if the existing code uses problematic algoritms (e.g. poor cache locality, high memory usage or high CPU usage if data structures grow bigger) or contains security vulnerabilities. If somebody is able to read code written by other people and understand it deeper than the surface, they must be a good developer already. No need to write any short fragments of code because for real work they could use Copilot to get baseline code that they can then fix.
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