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Someone has to write that CSV parser though, don't they?

And sometimes you actually need to write things like sort algorithms. I implemented an insertion sort from scratch recently, because it needed to be done in a particular way to take advantage of the capabilities of a specific JIT compiler.

People do actually do this stuff - it's not all academic.



Did you have to do this on a whiteboard or paper as part of the interview process for your job? The point: not being able to do this on a interview in completely contrived circumstances with all the anxiety that comes with close scrutiny of a person who had the power to determine your future career is not a good gauge of your ability to do so when matters, given all the resources we as developers generally afford ourselves.

My biggest problem is that the vast majority of these tests is they only test two skills, neither of which is all that critical to software development beyond a certain minimum threshold: recollection and pattern matching known solutions to familiar problems. In my current level of competency with a decade of tenure in software development is this: if you're asking me to solve problems which I can easily "solve" with a few minutes of searching the web, you probably don't want or need someone like me whose spent the majority of their career on big projects which require a multitude of disciplines from being creative to quantifying results to forethought of future use to systematically testing and releasing at a minimum of risk....

What I find ironic is that I've never been tested on some of the few rote tasks which I find most developers struggle with: committing/branching/merging/commenting code, producing post release documentation, developing robust API functions, etc etc




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