pixeloution

Speaking of your tests - your general coding skills one has an actual bug in the code, as of a few hours ago (I sent an email about it, hopefully it gets fixed)

In this context, prints mean "original prints" which doesn't translate to junk or reproductions. Some original prints are worth in excess of half a million dollars.

I’m quickly approaching 50, and work as a tech lead/developer at one of the top few companies in the world earning well.

Age may make it more difficult, but in the end what you’re able to do matters most.

And here's the problem. People don't agree what's hard/easy. If I ask you to find duplicate values in a nested data structure (arrays of arrays) ... that calls for recursion. I think that's easy.

So I'm curious how they define hard/easy.

Personally a bit frustrated to see desktop applications go to subscription models where years can now go by without upgrades but I'm forced to continue to pay to use the app.

If I'm unsure on how long before there will be a worthwhile upgrade, am I paying $80 for this app, or $400? Its a bit like being told that you can buy an item but won't know its real cost upfront.

I understand subscription models where they offer something that's ongoing (remove disk, sync, whatever) but I find this model annoying and its forced me to change software I use quite a bit in the last few years (most recently moving off 1password).

Charge me more if you have to, but stop this "keep paying forever" madness.

I can't talk to you about my team's current problems, and neither should anyone else. If I do and you offer up a solution I'm in real trouble ... because that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Try to remember, this is the country where a range check function resulted in a lawsuit:

    private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex {
         if (fromIndex > toIndex)
              throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                   ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
         if (fromIndex < 0) 
              throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
         if (toIndex > arrayLen) 
              throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
    }

> Only a few rarified corporate people and independent consultants can pull down pay in the 200s.

I'm not sure that's true. I've lost track of the number of software engineers I know who are in at least the low 200's Total Comp (in Texas).

Common? Probably not. Rarified? Not as much as you think. There's two just on my current team.

I'm not sure I could give an in-depth answer, especially under pressure in an interview. What I could do is explain the important bits at a high level:

    * how a B-Tree index is structured (and how that affects range queries, and wildcard queries)
    * how a query uses a single index per table, or can create a merge index
    * how a covering index increases performance
    * how composite indexes affect queries, why you don't need an index on both (col-a) and (col-a, col-b)

I don't think its unreasonable to expect a senior developer to know this stuff. It affects your ability to write performant queries against larger (1M - 1B rows) datasets.

Just to add to the above comment, a diceware passphrase is MUCH harder to break than most people realize. For example, compare the possible number of combinations:

  Diceware, 6 words          2.2 x 10^23
  Diceware, 5 words          2.8 x 10^19
  Diceware, 4 words          3.6 x 10^15
  a-zA-Z0-9, symbols, 10     4.3 x 10^19
  a-zA-Z0-9, 10char          8.4 x 10^17
  a-zA-Z0-9, 8char           2.2 x 10^15

A 6 word diceware phrase has 100 million more combinations than the 8 character alphanumeric.