A few years back or a decade back, the software development model was completely different from what we see today. We have been evolving along with the emerging technologies. In the past two decades, we have been seeing so many new technologies that also brings many best practices for software development. 20 years back people used to read lots of books to get knowledge about a programming language if they have to develop a computer program. It used to be tedious activity because just to implement a small functionality, they might have to write lines of code.
Today the software development is a lot better. I'm really happy that I was not part of that era where people were forced to learn the syntax of a programming language if they need a job. The interview process was very complicated where one should prove their knowledge by writing programs and algorithms to solve a particular requirement. Even today the same is happening in many companies where their product is still in legacy code. They hire people based on their in-depth knowledge of programming.
Today's developers
When I talk about the olden days, I'm able to see that today's developers are highly sophisticated. The reason why I say this is because I hear lots of stories from some of the experienced developers in my office. They used to say me lots of stories about their development career. When the programming world came into existence people started their career as a full stack developer where one person will be responsible for complete build and testing part along with the deployment part. Everything was considered an important skill for a developer.
But in today's world, the software development has been split into various streams where one group take care of the testing part, one group take care of the core development and one group take care of the development operations which will include deployments and taking care of environments. This has made the life cycle of development very robust and welcoming. We will be able to see full stack developers with multiple skills only on start-up companies or smaller companies. In bigger companies that exposure is very minimal. People don't usually have a necessity to learn the process from end to end.
Syntax is no longer required
When we see all this evolution happening, the internet has been a great achievement for the modern world. Day to day life of a developer is fully dependent on the Internet. There is no longer a requirement where people will have to sit and read the documentation and books to understand a programming language and how to write code. There is also no requirement to remember syntax and code. Every piece of information is nowadays available online with proper examples as well. This makes the life of a developer easier.
People with good logical, analytical and problem-solving skills are hired for the job and necessary training is provided. For any requirement, there is always a piece of code available online. The expectation from the developers nowadays is to grab the required code and build a highly secure application out of it. When it comes to testing there is a dedicated team available everywhere in every organization who take care of the testing part.
Even in today's interviews, the candidates are not asked to sit and write any programs unless the hiring is done by any legacy company. Modern companies clearly understand the fact that anyone can take the code from online sources or refer to online documentation anytime and write the code. All they expect is to see if the candidates are clever enough to do that. The modern technologies bring easy features where anyone can learn programming with some basic in-built talents. And if they just learn one language, they will be able to manage with other languages as well.
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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://bala-blog.com/remembering-syntax-is-no-longer-a-requirement/
It hurts when you say legacy companies make you write code in interviews :) Cos during interviews I ask people to write some code to solve the problem, I emphasise that it need not be dependent on any specific language. I encourage them to write pseudocode or atleast the logic for given problem or algorithm. I believe if you can't solve a problem(atleast to some extent) on a paper, you will spend many hours on screen!
In my prev org, we used to do a lot of whiteboarding, during interviews as well as in the project.
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Lol. Sorry to hurt you. I completely understand that problem solving skills are very important. Without analytical and logical thinking skills, it is definitely not easy for anyone to survive as a developer.
But we had a practice here in my company itself where vague written test to write programs were given without even testing their analytical and logical skills. Anyone who can memorize the code can get through the test but on floor they will struggle.
I completely agree that we can give the candidates some technical questions or even ask them to write simple programs but asking them questions only on the syntax part and rejecting them just because they didn't have the syntax on their finger tips is something that is changing nowadays. Especially with microservices and front end development and all, the developers are given full freedom to write code in any language they want.
That's how we are transforming.
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