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Comment by ovebepari | Hacker News Reader

I understand the rant but I would like to hire someone who are good at solving problems (of any kind) and can detect the edge cases very well and without deep math or competitive programming knowledge, it's not possible at all these days.

However, I am an undergrad myself and sometimes I take pride in being a generalist, spent my fair share of time on every abstraction layers of CS possible. Now that I'm in my final year, I'm concentrating to know more about *nix system internals, doing a thesis on Computer File Systems and occasionally doing Competitive Programming to be a better problem solver.

I understand the rant.

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“ but I would like to hire someone who are good at solving problems (of any kind) and can detect the edge cases very well and without deep math or competitive programming knowledge, it's not possible at all these days.”

You shouldn’t be so opinionated before you’ve entered the work place. If you find, after a few years of experience, that this is true then fine.

My point is competitive programming or math competitions isn't a field specific skill. It teaches you various ways to solve various (life) problems in general. Brute forcing, divide and conquer, backtracking, recursion/Induction can be applied to anything.

I'm not opinionated. If there is any other way of proving that someone is good at these tactics, I'd love to work with them.

> deep math or competitive programming knowledge

I think I read too much into deep. Certainly I'd expect any non-junior dev I work with to understand those concepts! But I wouldn't assume someone who published several papers on knot theory is any better at development that someone who hacked together a couple startup side-businesses, except in very very specific domains.

people spent their bachelors degree solving problems of some kind. turns out problems of different kind requires different bachelor degrees. for porkin sake, people need to grow up and accept that the state of the art measurement models of human raw intelligence have flaws so much that they can be rendered useless.

> "turns out problems of different kind requires different bachelor degrees."

Aren't we talking about CS here. I understand your point ofc. As a CS undergrad, what other options you have to prove that you are capable and know different strategies and tactics (brute forcing, divide and conquer etc) to handle and maybe solve a problem?

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