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Comment by DanWaterworth | Hacker News Reader

I'm self taught and working as a developer. I found these questions almost trivial, I'm genuinely surprised so many developers are having problems with them.

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Whilst I agree with you on being self-taught and knowing those answers I will say that I finally went and got an MSc in Computer Science after 12 years working professionally as a developer and being self-taught.

Part of the reason was to find out what I didn't know.

What I didn't know was basically some parts of set theory and quite a chunk of automata theory.

I did find cperciva's questions to be trivial, but I wouldn't say that makes them trivial. A TV quiz once said, "It's easy when you know the answer.".

Algorithms for someone else might be what automata theory was to me.

I agree, you'll only know the answer if you've taken the time to learn about the specific concepts being tested.

I suppose what I'm surprised about is that a large number of developers haven't taken the time to learn (or have since forgotten) the theory around these particular concepts.

Life isn't a perpetual data structures class.

I aced an Advanced Algorithms course at a major public university last semester, and I don't recall learning about B-trees. I mean, I usually have pretty good retention of things I learn, and the rest of the "test" was easy enough, and I'd expect to at least think "that sounds familiar" about anything that's come up in a class, but even after I looked up B-trees, I grasped the concept fairly quickly, but it didn't seem like anything I'd learned before.

I wonder if I legitimately just forgot about B-trees, or if my algorithms courses just didn't cover them.

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