⟨𝗰𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗻⟩

@OfficialTanvi how are you adjusting to the new city?!

@shortstein Flip k times, let S be the number of heads. If S < k/2, return coin has heads with prob 0.4; otherwise, return coin has heads with prob 0.6. The error prob is max{ P(X≥k/2), P(Y≤k/2) }, with X ~ Bin(k, 0.4), Y ~ Bin(k, 0.6). This error prob is at most 5% when k ≥ 67.

@fairyartmother Faintly see a 6

@OfficialTanvi happy birthday!

@KWargamer @Hasen_Judi ahh that last point especially helps make sense of this. any idea of how prevalent this is at a place like google/meta? they are big enough companies where I could imagine some teams operating like this and having people like that.

@choward1491 @Hasen_Judi Most of them are very definitely not. They outlast other people but now that avg industry tenures are sub-2y that's not a big challenge... They're promoted because "it's been 2y and we don't want them to leave because they're the only ones who know where everything is."

Back in 2015 I was the interviewer side in for a programmer position. Many people could talk the talk, some of them had "impressive" looking resume. Most of them could not answer this simple question: Given an array with numbers and nulls, split it to multiple arrays, with null as the separator. I think it's a very basic question, and I think anyone who could not even begin to formulate an answer doesn't know how to program. I understand it's not always easy to program under pressure, so I would always ask the candidate first to just describe in words what the process is generally like. Most candidates just had a stunned look on their face and they would try to mumble some non-sense.

@KWargamer @Hasen_Judi so weird.

@choward1491 @Hasen_Judi Yes, but they apply this to everything. Code that runs once at start-up and they'll bend heaven and earth to prevent a small structure copy... Then you find 10yo much-modified code running once a frame that are producing noticeable slowdowns... and no-one wants to touch them!!!

@KWargamer @Hasen_Judi I’ve heard of people like this but I always wonder how they get there, whether they are actually a prodigy developer or something else is going on.

@choward1491 @Hasen_Judi See a lot of people with that fixed by overly-rapid promotions. Seniors who are 3y out of uni. Principals in their 20s who've worked on 2 projects. They program in one language, have 'heard of' "clean code", invented the details and are absolutely certain they're Always Right.

@KWargamer @Hasen_Judi I see your thought process and I think there’s some truth to it for many situations. There do exist problems that require a bit of thought to architect solutions for tho, not because of the software side but due to the constraints of the system and ensuring correctness.

@Hasen_Judi @choward1491 This also matches for the "early perfectionism" problems I see a lot of. Coding is hard, so you only want to write it once... so it must be perfect first time. And the difficulty means no energy is available to do cleanups. All because people aren't fluent at it.

@KWargamer @Hasen_Judi I see, makes sense. Feels weird tho, never seen such an environment in the wild. I can appreciate someone who has good ideas, but I cannot imagine these engineers have many if their lack of skills means they do not have a precise sense of pros and cons of ideas they have.

@choward1491 @Hasen_Judi They heard that software engineering is a team sport and as long as their team includes 1 person who writes the actual code, it doesn't have to be *them*... but they're good engineers because they keep getting "solid performer" assessments.

@Hasen_Judi @KWargamer As for it being an old problem, you’d think people might have some self awareness.

@choward1491 @KWargamer It's a very old problem. I think it's been made worse by "coding bootcamps" and will be made even worse by the rise of LLMs. Already had the terrible experience of working with someone who doesn't know anything about programming and just uses LLMs. blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-progr…

@Hasen_Judi @KWargamer I’ve seen computer science students on Reddit crying about the fact they relied way too much on LLMs, to the point they are leaving uni with barely any actual programming skills to help them got a job. It even hurts them in learning broader computer science concepts.

@KWargamer @Hasen_Judi Someone with the inability to do such a basic problem just makes me wonder if an LLM would be more useful than them. I have to imagine for such a high fail rate, most of these people must have never actually learned to program and are just hoping to fly under the radar.

@choward1491 @Hasen_Judi It's well over 50% fail these sorts of things. They spend their careers in large teams in slow moving environments, where a day's work is "having a meeting to discuss moving ticket 658622 from 'ready-to-test' into 'pre-test-prep'..." and they can hide their inability to code...

@angryfermion calling me out

you can study engineering and still be incredibly stupid

@OfficialTanvi I’m always ready when

@OfficialTanvi sounds like a good update?

@OfficialTanvi congrats on getting through it!!

@adad8m I made slides [1] a bit ago along this topic and a key result implied for any fixed ℇ > 0 and for any random sample of n = O(exp(d ℇ^2)) points from the d-ball, with good prob they are all almost unit vectors and their inner products are ≤ ℇ. [1]: christianjhoward.me/talks/theory_r…

@stevenstrogatz The equation is equivalent to 0 = mn-n-2m with positive integers m,n. Substitute m=x+1 and n=y+2 and get new equation xy=2 with positive integers x, y. The only two solns for (x,y) then are (1,2) and (2,1) which implies (m,n) has only solns (2,4) and (3,3).

Find all positive whole numbers m and n that satisfy 1/m + 2/n = 1. Explain how you know you have found ALL the possible solutions. (I saw this question in the latest issue of the journal "Mathematics Teacher", aimed at helping K-12 teachers improve their pedagogy.)

@alz_zyd_ can find plenty of math at the grad level for CS folks who do theoretical CS or machine learning theory, to name a couple, so it’s still not like ME is inherently doing tougher math stuff. Most SWEs may not do much math on the job but most ME engineers don’t either. 6/x

@alz_zyd_ Now if you start to talk about grad school, things change some. Some ME folks get into scientific computing or control theory and have to dive into more mathematical areas like functional analysis or dynamic systems, so some MEs get into more math. But you 5/x

Is it just me or does CS require a lot less math than say, mechanical engineering. I'm looking at a mech eng textbook and feel like the median (pretty good) SWE would not have the math skills to get through this