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Discussion on: Does the college degree matter nowadays?

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diaakhateeb profile image
Diaa Elkhateeb

I started my career as a C & C++ programmer for Telecom system. Sometimes, I had to spend couple of days debugging my code because of pointer exception that is not caught. In addition, the system was real time, asynchronous and multi-threading. Imagine you debug thousands thousands of lines of code and you have limited hardware resources such as 4MB RAM which requires your code to optimize memory allocation.

Imagine the same situation with the medical devices that work in emergency cases. You must ensure that they never fail when they get into the field.

There are lots of examples where applications have to consider what I mentioned in the article.

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matiasagnolin profile image
Matías

What kind of tools would you use to check memory utilization?

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diaakhateeb profile image
Diaa Elkhateeb
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nbageek profile image
Patrick Minton

Sure, of course there are jobs where this matter. At my previous job, I worked with a lot of embedded applications and our devs messed around a lot in the kernel. Those guys need to know this. I on the other hand was writing javascript video players. I did not, although I had to know a heck of a lot about video and audio codecs, javascript internals, etc.

Software development is a huge field. Someone designing a REST server in Java that'll run in the cloud really isn't going to need to know any of this stuff, and if he's been doing it the last 10 years, he'll be rusty on it.

It's just like how every lazy interviewer (I speak from experience, having been one) asks candidates to do binary tree traversals even when the candidates are applying for a job where the vast majority of what they'll need to do is actually string manipulation. If the candidate was a genius at regexes (which are really hard!), they never find out because they're just hung up on whether the candidate can whiteboard an algorithm he hasn't used since college.

And the real kicker in hiring philosophies like this is leads to engineering cultures where developers look at phone screens and interviews as ways to prove to the candidate how smart they are, rather than ways to drill into the behavioral candidates that your company should care about. I'll take "attention to detail" over "knows heapsort backwards and forewords" as a characteristic every day.

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diaakhateeb profile image
Diaa Elkhateeb

Excellent! We are on the same page.