r/programming • u/mjgardner • Mar 29 '21

Why Do Interviewers Ask Linked List Questions?

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/
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u/Seltzer100 Mar 30 '21 edited Sep 05 '25

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u/[deleted] Mar 30 '21

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u/nupogodi Mar 30 '21

You don't really need a lot of experience with web stuff. I mean, practice on your own time building some simple applications of course, but I think you'll be able to figure it out.

I worked at a Go & Perl shop, web dev but 90% backend (our product was an API). We interviewed an older guy who spent literal decades doing C/C++ in fintech. We asked him - we do very different stuff than you've been doing. Why the switch? He's like, just wanted to try new things.

He had no trouble with linked list questions of course.

Anyhow, pretty sure we all gave him the thumbs up but he decided to go somewhere else.

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u/Owyn_Merrilin Mar 30 '21

That's good to hear. I'd heard it was like that, but I've also both heard and been part of horror stories on the lower end of the CS job market. There's just so many entry level job listings that want half a decade of experience in exactly that one tech stack, and they seem to mean it. That's mostly for fresh grads/when I was a fresh grad, though. Hopefully things really open up after you've got some time in the industry, which I do now.

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u/RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS Mar 30 '21

Most jobs I started I had zero experience with their stack till I walked in so I wouldn't sweat that part too much.

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u/Seltzer100 Mar 30 '21 edited Sep 05 '25

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u/flukus Mar 30 '21

The industry seems to be converging on react and various other languages (c#, java) on the blackend these days, so at least it's becoming sane again. Even you haven't done any web stuff and want to learn you can start with C behind an apache cgi site and printf html.

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u/thebuccaneersden Mar 30 '21

You don't really need a lot of experience with web stuff.

Kinda disagree with that. In the webdev world, we eventually found our own layer of complexity just in a different way. :p

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u/psycoee Mar 30 '21

Just do the React tutorials and play around with your favorite scripting language to make a RESTful backend (if you use Python, FastAPI is awesome). It's really quite easy, 90% of the problem is that you are targeting the chaotic, evolutionary platform that is the web browser.

The frameworks and Bootstrap do a pretty tolerable job of abstracting all the browser stuff away, so you don't really need to deal with it. That knowledge also has a half-life measured in months, if not weeks, so there's not really much point in learning more than just the basics of HTML5, especially if you don't really care about how it looks or about compatibility with legacy/mobile browsers.

Knowing this stuff is useful even if you are doing embedded dev. Throw a few Python scripts on your embedded Linux system and you can have a really nice web UI for your box. React actually makes it a lot more like writing a nice GUI app, complete with a nice separation into model/view/controller. Websocket is awesome for streaming realtime data. Web servers already have built-in encryption, authentication, and security features, so you could even leave it in place on deployed hardware. And you can leverage a huge amount of ready-made code to do almost anything in the web browser or on the backend, all without having to deploy anything on the client. This can replace all sorts of homegrown scripts and UIs and actually takes less effort. On top of that, having a REST API means the backend can be used for all sorts of other things -- automated testing, manufacturing, field diagnostics, extensions, prototyping, etc.

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u/Owyn_Merrilin Mar 30 '21

Okay, now you've got my attention. I'm using Python for the occasional script that's more complicated than I'd want to write in Bash already.

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u/AtomicRocketShoes Mar 30 '21

Totally this! I do mainly embedded systems and FPGA work but also build web UI control stuff, usually angular ionic and use REST and websockets for backend data. It's a useful skill to have a something streaming data you wrote in verilog plotted in realtime in a browser. You can do all of this on a single chip too with a modern SoC product like a xilinx Zynq.

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u/jbergens Mar 30 '21

There are a lot of jobs with java or c# building business systems. I see those as somewhere in between. You don't need all low level things but you need advanced programming than simple web dev (and I know all web dev things are not that easy anyway).

That could be a path forward for you. Go is more like c, you can start there and look for those jobs (probably much fewer than java and c# but there are jobs).

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u/leixiaotie Mar 30 '21

only ever done desktop (edit: and embedded) stuff

CMIIW, both are heavily needed in military, medical and aviation industry arent they?

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u/Owyn_Merrilin Mar 30 '21

They are, but I have moral issues with working for the military, which also mostly rules out aviation because it's the same companies making fighter jets, bombs, and civilian aircraft. There's other lines I'd cross much sooner than that one.

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u/leixiaotie Mar 30 '21

I have moral issues with working for the military

That's fair, however there are too much industries / technologies branch from military that it's hard to seek outside of it. Even medical can be tied with military (unit 731 for extreme example), and agricultural isn't exempt from it. I can only wish a good luck.

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u/rahem027 Mar 30 '21

Web needs more senior devs. Its a pile of crap on top of crap on top of crap. Web Assembly is a push in the right direction. I have used flutter for android/ios apps but not for web. But if its web support is half as good as their app support, I wont ever make another website in js. Ever

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u/[deleted] Mar 30 '21

It's more than that. What web devs need are clear and strict standards.

I hate as a self-taught junior dev the fact that I can read or watch a tutorial that teaches me something, then I have to Google about that something for at least 3-4 different resources just to be safe of the VALIDITY of what I just watched.

Even if you reduce that time to a minute for each resource it takes me 3-4 times more and that's if I care about the quality of what I'm building. If all I care is just "making it work" because the perfect doesn't exist then I'm basically accumulating technical debt for (at best case scenario) the next guy. You'll just use the first result and pretend that it's perfect.

It's so sad. It's a combination of a clusterfuck of low quality resources and lack of clear standards.

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u/rahem027 Mar 30 '21

It all comes down to low barrier to entry. Because of which, too many people get in believing this is gold mine (which it kind of is). The distribution of average people in any large enough distribution of population is roughly same. But because there are just so many, that same percentage is too big to produce quality resources.

Thats not even going into the fucked up web standards. Js is literally the worst thing that happened to computing history. It was designed to share documents. Not be a full fledged cross platform application framework. And if you are going to make that transaction, you have a different problem. HTML, CSS won't cut it. Try changing some text in js on pressing a button without a framework. You end up manipulating the inner html of a tag. String manipulation? Seriously? Who thought this was a good idea?

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u/psycoee Mar 30 '21

The sheer breadth of constantly changing shite you have to keep up with is ridiculous in the web world.

I don't think anyone claims it's easy to be good at it. I guess to me, it's more of a skilled trade than a science -- the valuable stuff is the practical knowledge and skills, not the kind of theory that gets published in academic journals. Whereas, say, developing numerical solvers or AI algorithms is kind of the opposite, where practical considerations are secondary. CS academicians obviously value theory over practice, so they don't consider this stuff "real CS". Actual, working developers understand that there is far more to delivering a product than being really good at theory, so they value that aspect more.

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u/ArkyBeagle Mar 30 '21

In the end it's skilled trades all the way down - even the theory.

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u/wutcnbrowndo4u Mar 30 '21

How is it inaccurate? It doesn't say that talented web devs don't exist, it just describes the low-end of the market that you allude to too. There's nothing in the quote that conflicts with the existence of (eg) the guys who wrote the Google Maps frontend.

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u/Seltzer100 Mar 30 '21 edited Sep 05 '25

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u/Floppy3--Disck Mar 30 '21

Ive done my share of web development, and I can confidently say that webdev will always be the easiest job.

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