The quality of a good programmer is the ability to know how to beg borrow and steal the right code - AND when not to try and solve a problem from scratch.
Interview of two candidates
Q Write a class to put these items in a linked list.
Candidate 2 Derived class from a library linked list class, and used sample code - Got job and went down to pub to celebrate!
As a Software Engineer, problem solving skills are 80% of software engineering. The syntax of programming and programming well is the difference between a good programmer and a great programmer.
I was passed over for a job because I couldn't "Write a function to compute the moving average of a stock price." Heck, I didn't even know what a "moving average" was. But when I got home I sat down and 20 minutes later I had a nifty little recursive function that answered the question. Why couldn't I do that in the interview? Because in the interview I didn't have the resources I would normally have while on the job. A good Software Engineer knows how to use those resources to solve programming problems.
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