IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

lendarios_sl said:

I'll just leave this nugget here
Be familiar with writing recursive algorithms

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REVERSE A BINARY TREE LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL /dumb interview questions

Khane_sl said:

Oh god, having to change core functionality at even an if/else level? No thanks. I was under the impression they just provided a suite of functionality that you had to add a variable or parameter to here and there. Sounds like you guys are completely changing the entirety of the functionality if you're even changing logic within. Why even use third party software at that point? Ugh.

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Ok to explain it a bit more, think of it this way.

They provide us code that if you were to throw it on a BIOS chip it may or may not work. It will initialize a CPU correctly because it is built specifically for a CPU, let's say Broadwell-DE. If we wanted Skylake code we'd purchase another source from them. So the chip will come up correctly, most of the board will work, but some stuff won't. Let's pretend we make a 10GbE NIC ourselves - we need to insert initializations, PCI-e link training, set up the PCI-e config space, etc. - it all has to be done at the same time other devices are coming up (known as PCI enumeration), so we need to insert it.

Sometimes we find areas in their code where we say "well, this feature is ok, but I'd really like to tweak these numbers custom for us."

Or we'll find a bug that isn't really a bug in their code, but we need to alter their code to fix it (not their fault, but it happens).

These are just a few examples.

And like I said, the codebase is 22k files. Also this is common practice in the BIOS world. I know it seems weird, and it is...

This is why I'm investigating Coreboot.


Edit and if any of this sounds frightening.. just think, sometimes I have to edit ASSEMBLY

Your job sucks Noodle.

Cad_sl said:

I don't know how you got there from what I said, but obviously not. The idea is that you need to know not just "use a vector if I need synchronized access hurr durr" but WHY and HOW vectors work, when you use a hashtable instead and what a hashtable is doing under the covers, so that you're not just consulting a book and deciding what to use based on a paragraph description or design pattern. Getting into how those structs work and what they do (and the sorts required to make them work) is like, a developers fucking job. Any tool can slam some shit code together that sort of works.

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Yes, but that's true for anything. In order to use something you need to know how it works. In order to know how data structures work you can spend 2 hours on google and know everything you need to use the built in functionality of whatever language you're working with. But we all know how I feel about CS degrees.

Khane_sl said:

Your job sucks Noodle.

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Only the mundane stuff.

I find BIOS really interesting and since no one knows what the hell I actually do I can pretend they're all subhumans writing their shitty Java

All of that is true except:

1) It's arguable that you get any kind of real world expertise from a classroom (meaning anything you'll be able to apply at your job with any kind of expertise day 1). You also don't learn all that much considering the amount of time a semester takes in the grand scheme of things.
2) College is really goddamn expensive. And this is my biggest gripe with higher learning in this country in general. I can't imagine trying to justify a CS degree at my Alma Mater with a price tag of $53k/yr nowadays.

I went to a public university and I'm doing just fine. Wasn't no goddamn $53k/yr

Cad_sl said:

But I don't think you're getting into any big-time developer positions these days without a college degree. If you started a long time ago - yea. If you're starting today? No way.

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I disagree with this but we've had this conversation many times before in several threads. Everyone's opinion stems mostly from their own experience in the field.

I think datastructures was my fave cs class. I've forgotten most of it, but I remember doing tree balancing stuff, B+ trees or something? Bucketses?

For games we can rarely use off the shelf containers as they are too loose with memory allocation. So over the years I've seen a lot of special purpose lists/vectors/queues etc that are tuned for a specific purpose. They can really bite you with platform specific compiler bugs though.

Kharza-kzad_sl said:

I think datastructures was my fave cs class. I've forgotten most of it, but I remember doing tree balancing stuff, B+ trees or something? Bucketses?

For games we can rarely use off the shelf containers as they are too loose with memory allocation. So over the years I've seen a lot of special purpose lists/vectors/queues etc that are tuned for a specific purpose. They can really bite you with platform specific compiler bugs though.

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Game Development (or high-performance systems See: Search, Trading) are the few places were knowledge of Data Structures is even required anymore. Still super important to have but I've never had to touch a custom data structure ever in my career outside of one job where I worked on Avionics.

Pretty much anything where you do Java, C# or any other high-level language you will never need to know anything outside of how to drool out the current fad design pattern.

I've never used data structures in practice, but there's not a whole lot of that going on in assembly land. Mostly I think of it like calculus, good to know where the foundation derived from but unless you're in the 1% that actually uses it there's no real use.

I know for sure Google and Facebook ask you about them.

Noodleface_sl said:

I've never used data structures in practice, but there's not a whole lot of that going on in assembly land. Mostly I think of it like calculus, good to know where the foundation derived from but unless you're in the 1% that actually uses it there's no real use.

I know for sure Google and Facebook ask you about them.

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The only reason I ever had to use due to government requirements around which C libraries could be used v.v;;;