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If your manager asks you to write a raw algorithm based on raw data in order to properly structure, sort and filter that data, how long do you take on average to complete said task?

Example:
Here's a text file with a bunch of continuous data like: john doe 5555 my street 123 karen wiscott 12347 her street 22 peter wright

..and then you first have to start identifying boundaries for each data entry (which is a task on its own, with comparators and shit), solve its bugs.. then you have to make sure it's properly getting sorted.. sort those bugs.. Yeah, it just takes a long time for me to figure all that out.

It takes me 4-5 days on average since I'm a junior but managers expect it to only take 1-4 hours.. madness..

Comments
  • 1
    Parsing data is almost like muscle memory at this point...

    Like i guess if there's no liner terminator that makes it tricky, but still, I think that 4 hours is pretty reasonable... maybe a day if I have to figure out how to terminate a line on my own because their file's syntax is tarded.
  • 0
    That is when I open the Ack documentation, or the jq documentation because I prefer fiddling with an already made tool instead of creating my own in whatever because the job is so boring
  • 1
    Id start from asking who produced that human centipede given you in input, and could he please add at least endlines when one person ends and another begins, pretty please

    (Really try, what if the thing could be solved in another place much easier)
  • 0
    @str-write Nah 'cause it was something asked at the start of the job to test my raw skills. In that company, even in production you get raw data and you're supposed to make sense of it. Sometimes clients give us a bunch of garbage we have to structure but most of the times they ask the client to preformat the data.

    My manager wanted to test me because a true coder should be able to code themselves out of the worst situations, such as no software licenses, no documentation, no client support, no time. That's when you have to dig deep back to your computer knowledge fundamentals.
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