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Comment by noitpmeder | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely not true. Think of all the studying that is required before applying to tech jobs these days. Sure someone won't fire you because you can't balance a binary tree by hand, but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job, regardless of if it applies to their day to day workloads.

If people stop manually coding their ability to do so WILL atrophy. Take away the coding agents and you'll soon have a generation of graduates wondering why their tab complete isn't writing the entire feature for them.

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> but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job, regardless of if it applies to their day to day workloads

As others have mentioned this is the problem. Not being able to pull up a binary tree the most efficient way on the spot should not be the criteria to identify a good developer.

But then the question becomes what are good criteria to do that ( and what is the easy way to do it for HR )?

> Think of all the studying that is required before applying to tech jobs these days.

Surely you realize this is the problem. I just landed a mid 6-figures job _without_ grinding leetcode. They’re out there. This game everyone plays is an abomination.

Right, but are you going to fix it by yourself? No. Is the point correct that most people wont remember half of the arcane rituals we're expected to perform on command only in an interview or in very specific parts of the job? Yes. Can we relearn it? Sure. Will skills atrophy if unused? Definitely, balancing a binary tree is not like riding a bike.

Remembering how to balance a binary tree is a complete waste of brainpower. We have lots of papers, books, and reference material that can show us this.

The arcane rituals of jumping though leetcode hoops reminds me of pledging a fraternity.

Surely you don't believe that there's a significant fraction of tech jobs that pay $500k?

No, not sure where you got that from.

Oh, I guess you were just sharing and this wasn't advice:

> I just landed a mid 6-figures job _without_ grinding leetcode. They’re out there. This game everyone plays is an abomination.

I’m way too humble and jaded to give advice to strangers on the internet, yes.

I offered an anecdote.

Surely you realize that "balancing binary tree" is just an example and the topic is not about recruitment process.

There’s a difference between not learning something, and not using something after learning it. For the latter the relearning process is fast. And often it may only requires a few hours of practices. There’s such thing as long term memory.

If you properly learn the skills, then refreshing your skills takes way less time than learning them the first time. This means you didn't really lose the skill.

>Sure someone won't fire you because you can't balance a binary tree by hand, but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job

People that do this need their behavior changed. Testing people on quickly find-able implementations is an absolute circus. Obviously an exception if the job actually involves writing CS algorithms, but most of them do not.

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