Comment by kragen

What if we just really enjoy clever algorithms?

I've probably implemented first-order Markov-chain text generation more than a dozen times in different languages, and earlier this week I implemented Newton–Cotes adaptive quadrature just because it sounded awesome (although I missed a standard trick because I didn't know about Richardson extrapolation). I've also recently implemented the Fast Hadamard Transform, roman numerals, Wellons–NRK hash tries, a few different variants of Quicksort (which I was super excited to get down to 17 ARM instructions for the integer case), an arena allocator with an inlined fast path, etc. Recently I wrote a dumb constrained-search optimizer to see if I could get a simpler expression of a word-wrap problem. I learned about the range-minimum-query algorithm during a job interview many years ago and ad-libbed a logarithmic-time solution, and since then I've found a lot of fascinating variants on the problem.

I've never had a job doing this kind of thing, and I don't expect to get one, just like I don't expect to get a job playing go, rendering fractals, reading science fiction, or playing video games. But I think there's a certain amount of transferable skill there. Even if what I need to do this week is figure out how to configure Apache to reverse proxy to the MediaWiki Docker container.

(I know there are people who have jobs hacking out clever algorithms on different platforms. I even know some of them personally. But there are also people who play video games for a living.)

I guess I'd fail your interview process?