Really timely. Someone was explaining to me they wanted engineers who understood big O and it's why they deemed the solution suboptimal. Your point about Linked Lists vs Arrays remind me of approaches that teams building High Frequency Trading systems used (Arrays) to speed up performance and information retrieval.
Good post. I'll add that we also still test knowledge of this content in interviews, even though us practitioners know it mostly doesn't apply in the real world. The reason we test it is because that is what is taught. I'm sure you would agree that it is still useful to teach asymptotic analysis, but the issue is one of emphasis and the caveats that were lacking in past teaching on this subject (not sure if this is taught differently today). I definitely came out of college thinking Big O mattered for performance and not understanding that the realities of hardware matter much more.
Really timely. Someone was explaining to me they wanted engineers who understood big O and it's why they deemed the solution suboptimal. Your point about Linked Lists vs Arrays remind me of approaches that teams building High Frequency Trading systems used (Arrays) to speed up performance and information retrieval.
Good post. I'll add that we also still test knowledge of this content in interviews, even though us practitioners know it mostly doesn't apply in the real world. The reason we test it is because that is what is taught. I'm sure you would agree that it is still useful to teach asymptotic analysis, but the issue is one of emphasis and the caveats that were lacking in past teaching on this subject (not sure if this is taught differently today). I definitely came out of college thinking Big O mattered for performance and not understanding that the realities of hardware matter much more.