Is "experience with algorithms" a new HR buzz phrase or something?
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Posted Apr 30, 2010, 9:13 PM UTC
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This is to screen out people who say "Why should I know that, everything you could need is in the standard library."
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I can't imagine expressing an opinion like that in an interview, even if I believed such a thing...but I can imagine that there are people that do.
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Then check out some redditor's comments on this post.
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The top comments (best sort) are complaining that the article oversells "only 10% of programmers can implement a bug-free binary search the first time without testing" as "only 10% of programmers can implement binary search".
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I haven't seen this but I guess it means more math-involved programming than the regular data-plumbing which is usual for enterprise and web programming
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That's pretty much what I was thinking, but there aren't any other hints that it might be a math-oriented job. Maybe it's just a common "mistranslation" between the dev shop and the people doing the hiring.
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Call up the hiring manager and ask what they mean by that. Chances are he or she will tell you that it's a bunch of HR bullshit.
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Is it a finance job? They might be trying to indirectly ask if you are able to understand and translate obtuse equations like a monte carlo method.
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They didn't seem to be finance-related; the most recent one was from a headhunter (never mind that I checked the "no headhunters" box everywhere I put my resume), and it was pretty vague in general.
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Then they are just trying to sound smart. It's probably a bullshit tacit, a java gig, or both.
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It's probably a bullshit tacit, a java gig, or both.
I didn't know there was a difference...
(sorry!)
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Huge difference. The bullshit tacit isn't a dead end job/career.
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It may be a way to weed out "went through a rigorous CS curriculum" from "took a few PHP or Java classes at a vocational training or community college". Most CS courseloads will include data structures and algorithms classes in C/C++.
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Most CS courseloads will include data structures and algorithms classes in C/C++.
Getting a associate degree in computer programming from a community college requires that as well. At least where I went to school.
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when i was looking for gainful employment, i noticed a lot of job posts had ripped from other job posts. It doesn't surprise me that one hr person would pull it out of their ass because they heard "google has an algorithm it uses for stuffs on the interwebs", only to have the next 4 posters copy their mistake.
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I'm hoping that's what they mean, since that's pretty much all I've done for the last 4 years. Of course, the definition of "a lot of math" varies greatly with the speaker, so I could find myself disappointed.
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I have experience in writing algorithms that search for HR buzzwords.
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Likely it does just mean competence with algs & DS. If recruiters are finally setting it as a requirement, then that's probably a step up from the old days when (so we are told) the bullet-point bingo card often didn't stray far from "three years of Oracle, five years of Java, three years of Eclipse, team player" and the like.
The other possibility is that they mean AI-ish techniques - hairy and/or heuristic search, NLP and so on. 'AI' is apparently still a tainted word in industry, but anything associated with the "Google algorithm" must be powerful medicine. (An example from 2007 (reddit), now sadly paywalled.) Of course, that would mean that when they say 'algorithms' what they mean is (to a large extent) heuristics as opposed to algorithms, but ah well.
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I've seen it a fair bit for jobs in investment banking, particularly for jobs that require working with high level quants. In that scenario, I would ake it to mean translating complex algorithms and mathematical structures from one language (matlab?) to another (C?). I would expect that using it in those hihg paid jobs would make it an HR buzzword, copied without thought for what it means.
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Probably it is to help find programmers who can do more than simply plug APIs together.