Currently contemplating how to tell interviewers I'm disqualifying them if they ask me about Gauss' rule or prime numbers or any such no doubt very cute math tricks on coding interviews. I get it—for whatever reason, you think liking math correlates with coding well. But, well, it doesn't, so this stopped being a coding interview and became a being-into-math interview.
Alternatively, I could start asking THEM math questions. "So you like math? Let's see what you know about FFT, SVD, KDtree…"
#Programming IS applied #math.
However, I'm afraid that most of math we do everyday is not on textbooks yet.
A solution is this: answer their question, then ask them how they apply this knowledge to their work.
If they are unable to answer, increase your money request by 25%, and tell them why.
@Shamar it isn’t.
@Shamar math is finding and proving unexpected results of simple rules, rules like algebraic rings or the reals or linear operators. Applied math is making something that wouldn’t work without some math, like Mersenne Twister or RSA. Programming is figuring out why my REST API is barfing when I enable gzip. Yes, Haskell people express their web servers as mathematical rules (functors, applicatives) but Go not so much. The math in interviews is purely a cultural barrier.
@Shamar I of course agree that if your job is going to be mathematical, like signal processing or portfolio optimization, I’m happy to talk about that. But I’m not interested in indulging interviewers’ power trips over making me solve their favorite little games of summations or combinatorics or ludic probabilities. It doesn’t show that I can “think clearly” or “logically”, it doesn’t predict my facility with software architecture and debugging. It’s just physics envy. Thanks for listening 🙏
That's why I said you should raise your salary request if the interviewer can't say how he would apply what he asked you to know.
To turn the interviewers' power trips agaist them.
But I do not agree much in your definition of #mathematics and I argue that any #programmer applies mathematics most of time, including "figuring out why my REST API is barfing when I enable gzip."
It's a pretty complex mathematical system that you can't find in textbooks (AFAIK), but it's #math anyway.
“…why stop at toy number theory problems, when surely your fintech app needs compressive sensing and spectral theory and special relativity.”
By the way I fully recognize what a lucky person I am to be able to tell an interviewer to GTFO when so many of my friends are looking for work. Y’all keep looking, don’t stop improving—we’ll make enough work for everyone soon enough. Hang in there.