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Comment on I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity

College? Pythagorean Theorem is mid-level high school math.

I did once talk to a high school math teacher about a graphics program I was hacking away on at the time, and she was surprised that I actually use the stuff she teaches. Which is to say that I wouldn’t expect most programmers to know it exactly off the top of their head, but I would expect they’ve been exposed to it and can look it up if needed. I happen to have it pretty well ingrained in my brain.

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yes, you learn it in the context of finding the hypotenuse of a triangle, but:

a lot of people are “bad” at math (more unconfident), but good with logic

geometry, trig, etc require a lot of memorization, so it’s easy to forget things

interviews are stressful, and good applicants will space on basic things

So when I’m interviewing, I try to provide things like algorithms that they probably know but are likely to space on, and focus on the part I care about: can they reason their way through a problem and produce working code, and then turn around and review their code. Programming is mostly googling stuff (APIs, algorithms, etc), I want to know if they can google the right stuff.

And yeah, we let applicants look stuff up, we just short circuit the less important stuff so they have time to show us the important parts. We dedicate 20-30 min to coding (up to an hour if they rocked at questions and are struggling on code), and we expect a working solution and for them to ask questions about vague requirements. It’s a software engineering test, not a math test.
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- Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah, that’s absolutely fair, and it’s a bit snobby of me to get all up in arms about forgetting a formula - although it is high school level where I live. But to be handed the formula, informed that there’s an issue and still not fix it is the really hard part to wrap my head around, given it’s such a basic formula.
  
  I guess I’m also remembering someone I knew who got a programming job off the back of someone else’s portfolio, who absolutely couldn’t program to save their life and revealed that to me in a glaring way when I was trying to help them out. It just makes me think of that study that was done that suggested that there might be a “programmer brain” that you either have or you don’t. They ended up costing that company a lot to my knowledge.
  
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