given two full hours and any high-level language
(including pseudocode) only 10 percent of professional
programmers implemented binary search correctly,
according to Jon Bently.
Wow!
I'm not particularly intelligent and I'm not in the top 10% -- but I could implement an in-place quick-sort in C in 10 minutes that my interviewer could run with only a minor fix (forgot a semi-colon), and I even described the parallel version with OpenMP (although there I got the syntax slightly wrong). This was for my interview at Adobe, when I got hired by them a couple of years ago; went on to other things since then.
By that logic that should place me in the top 1 percent ... but so are my ~ 100 friends that are also software developers from my city, and statistically speaking, something smells like shit in those statistics thrown around.
Maybe binary search, when discovered, used to be a hard to understand problem, but now it is taught from high-school. And sure there are lots of idiots out there, but many of those idiots also believe they are in the top 10%, because some statistic told them so.
So cut the crap and build stuff. Only by that metric you can prove yourself.
-- EDIT --
I'm not referring or addressing the article's author directly. I'm also not saying that you SHOULD be able to implement binary search, or quick-sort or whatever metric du-jour -- in interview conditions. I get it that you may be stressed by eyes watching you, or that you may be bitten by edge-cases other people haven't noticed for years.
I'm referring more to these metrics flowing around -- like, if you read HN you're in the top 5%, if you read this stupid blog you're in the top X%, if you can implement binary search ... etc, etc...
We are software developers, mathematicians, computer scientists -- surely we understand selection bias and should be able to recognize bullshit, even if it doesn't appeal to our ego.
I'm not particularly intelligent and I'm not in the top 10% -- but I could implement an in-place quick-sort in C in 10 minutes that my interviewer could run with only a minor fix (forgot a semi-colon), and I even described the parallel version with OpenMP (although there I got the syntax slightly wrong). This was for my interview at Adobe, when I got hired by them a couple of years ago; went on to other things since then.
By that logic that should place me in the top 1 percent ... but so are my ~ 100 friends that are also software developers from my city, and statistically speaking, something smells like shit in those statistics thrown around.
Maybe binary search, when discovered, used to be a hard to understand problem, but now it is taught from high-school. And sure there are lots of idiots out there, but many of those idiots also believe they are in the top 10%, because some statistic told them so.
So cut the crap and build stuff. Only by that metric you can prove yourself.
-- EDIT --
I'm not referring or addressing the article's author directly. I'm also not saying that you SHOULD be able to implement binary search, or quick-sort or whatever metric du-jour -- in interview conditions. I get it that you may be stressed by eyes watching you, or that you may be bitten by edge-cases other people haven't noticed for years.
I'm referring more to these metrics flowing around -- like, if you read HN you're in the top 5%, if you read this stupid blog you're in the top X%, if you can implement binary search ... etc, etc...
We are software developers, mathematicians, computer scientists -- surely we understand selection bias and should be able to recognize bullshit, even if it doesn't appeal to our ego.