I'd be into it if I was 10 years younger and about a thousand miles closer.

But now I'm happy with my lower stressed engineering job. Way easier people to deal with than pinball fans

Linked lists are kinda rare in the wild these days. I'm going to guess there's probably zero linked lists in the software of JJP or Stern. It used to be that what you could accomplish was 100% limited by the hardware you ran on. Now, I think the industry, and CS programs, focus on tools, implementation and practices over theory/analysis of algorithms. The fact that javascript went and took over everything; I mean there are no complex data structures like linked lists etc in JS. transforms, putting things over the wire, that's most software jobs. Shit even low power, inexpensive $35 raspberry pis can run .net and you don't have to manage your memory or anything like that.

Abstract class, yeah that is first principles and a dev that couldn't give me a quick explanation would not make my team.

Any chance you guys need this position as a remote, part time to help? I am fairly familiar with programming languages and have built my own pinball machine. Have done automation programming for power industry as well.

I would never quit my full time job for it as the pay cut is way too large, but would love a part time job doing something I love.

One thing to keep in mind is when I started programming machines I ended up playing less pinball, outside of the whatever the current title I was working on. Even more so during lockdown when the game I was working on was in my house. One of the reasons I tried to get to the enterreium league is to play something else. Until I parted ways with American pinball most of machines at home were covered in dust. And no RazerX my playboy is not yet for sale, and you still have first dibs.

a linked list is a complex and non-existent data structure for an embedded application? huh...

IIRC the ROM for TSPP has zero space left after all features were implemented. Rewriting to (attempt to) cram in this option is simply isn't worth the effort. Especially since only a very few vocal people were complaining about it. But you just keep on holding that grudge...

Turning off the flippers to save on hardware seems like the sort of solution to a minor problem that adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. It's better for them to just flip because the one time they don't flip when they should, some players will rage stroke

I've noticed that issue on Halloween/Ultraman. The main flippers get disabled while in the game store spending points and choosing a mode, but they don't always reenable when they should. So you just watch the ball drain after the lifter serves the ball back up... The sort of bug that would make you not want to play the game again. All to reduce the wear on the flippers by like 1%

My guess is that some of the legacy utilities of pinball programming were written in lower languages than C++, maybe C. I think Brian Eddy said he used to program in Assembler, must have been B/W Black Rose or Indy? (early '90s). I'd guess the next step was C, which required a lot of coded memory management. Probably the Stern software team still has to get in that utility code today for various reasons. JJP has not been around that long but I guess Keith might be saying they still program new code in lower languages using linked lists. Embedded code maybe?

TIL: $80K is a good salary for developers and LinkedLists are everywhere.

I've been a developer for 20 years. I only wrote LinkedList implementations in college. While I'm sure embedded systems might have need for them, I would never ding a kid coming out of college for not knowing how to implement one. (Especially since I'm pretty sure the c++ standard lib has a forward-list implementations these days.) He might go on to do React, or be a cloud architect, or do a million other things that don't require it. Software engineering has become such a big, diverse field of work. 25 years ago there were no devops guys and web dev was hacking perl scripts together and tossing them in your cgi-bin folder. 35 years ago games programmers were writing in 6502. Hell, I was a web dev for the first half of my career then did 10 years doing backend and mobile. I couldn't even come back to web now, because its changed so fundamentally. Anyways, I'd say 95% of developers today can't write a linked list implementation and don't know how to manage their own memory. But they can containerize their apps in docker, use modern package management and source control suites, and other things that IMHO are way more important to graduating engineers in most careers open to them.

Linked lists are non-contiguous memory, maybe structs containing memory address pointers to the next memory block I guess they could be described as. If I remember correctly, this creates long execution times if adding a memory block to a long linked list, as access is serial. I actually had to debug a Nestle plant system running our SCADA software as they were having production issues with operator network nodes timing out. So hard convincing them to let me install a debug build on their system, but finally they let me. In debugging it live on-site, with a Nestle guy looking over my shoulder, I found that for every SCADA alarm, it was being added into 7 different alarm linked lists, for various sorting criteria, taking too much time as they were generating tons of alarms as normal procedure and the nodes were timing out as a result, waiting for CPU time. I gave Nestle the ability to use a configuration file and disable the alarm lists they were not interested in, and that worked, they were using just 2. I delivered a release software patch, Nestle admins disabled the linked lists they did not need, Nestle production came back on line and babies got their formula without a hiccup. Very proud of what I did there. Our kernel code was all written in C, the rest in C++. Nestle offered me a job they were so happy about it. Maybe linked lists are safer than a general block of side by side memory regarding hacking if implementing them today? Is this how crypto works for block chain? Don't know anything about crypto.

IMO it’s equally if not more important to know *when* to use a data storage/management method than just knowing how they work and how to write them.

When I was in a SW role (MCU+DSP embedded and earlier FW engineer for bluetooth chipset), I’ve seen some glaring mis-application of linked lists for interprocessor message exchange that were a bitch to debug in a real time system and also performed poorly.

Especially in embedded, KISS rules supreme.

Please, dear SW developer/architect, only use linked lists if necessary, like if you want to sort items or insert/remove at random locations.

Agree with parts of this, but after living in the UK for years and managing teams there for decades, US social and company sponsored benefits like SS, Medicare, 401k match, public sector pensions, etc are often better than the UK. The average standard of living in the US is just far higher. My data is about 5 years old and not for London, but we use to pay senior, non manager, IT and engineering professionals 50-80k pounds and were one of the best payers around.

Yes, there is a huge difference between real-time developers and web development. I've spent most of my career doing either game development or flight simulator development (in C/C++ and/or assembler). In those environments, you are coding at a completely different level than Java.

And memory-management in an embedded environment is usually critical.

This is a weird test imo. What does it prove? That someone has memorized a data structures text book? Do the game companies in question not have an internal, common implementation of their data structures that have been fully tested and approved for use?

Allow them to use stl, or even pseudo code. The more important thing to measure is whether or not they can solve the problem, discuss their solution and the potential pitfalls. Unless the job is about writing data structure code that has 1000+ implementations available since the 80s.

Sorry, pet peeve of mine. I just think a lot of tech interviews these days measure the wrong things, or measure things that in the real world you would just look up on the internet if you were unsure/needed a refresher.

This is why I like civil engineering. In a job interview I can just say "look at that building over there... still standing..." instead of having to do college homework problems during an interview to demonstrate competency.

So true about tests. I’m in a different field, more design oriented, and there are design tests. It’s total BS because it’s contrived and products are not designed that way in real life so it doesn’t really tell much. Like you said, someone that knows their stuff can have a 10 minute conversation with an applicant and determine if they can do the job or not.

16MB!, As Monty Python would say "We used to DREAM of living in a corridor."

Try writing a 3D Star Trek game on the GameBoy with its 8K of ram...

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Has anyone figured out how to debug into an STL container? Or any reason to?

Off the top of my head I'd describe it as a table of function pointers to perform the methods and property get and sets. COM wraps the v-table pointers, IDispatch, but you can call them directly through the IUnknown->Invoke method. IDispatch/OLE Automation. It's what I do for a living, SolidWorks CAD API. Good discussion thanks.

Yeah, I did some XBOX1 dev too. I worked on most console systems from the original GameBoy through PS3. The last game I worked on was WALL-E for PS3. Since then I've been doing commercial and military simulation stuff.

If you are using a Microsoft debugger (Visual Studio, VSCode, WinDbg) that supports the natvis format, you can easily drill down into STL containers and lots of other non-language-native types, and you can add support for your own custom datatypes and containers. https://www.cppstories.com/2021/natvis-tutorial/

Woah. Take'er easy big fella. As I said, it was "imo". The easier it is to Google an answer to a question the less useful I have found it as a way of measuring how good a software developer is. I've interviewed guys who could rattle that stuff off in their sleep and I wouldn't trust them to code their way out of a wet paper sack.

I'll pass on the free lecture on C++ stuff, and I'll pass on the career dick measuring contest. Just for reference though, it is bigger than some, but probably smaller than others.

I couldn't agree more. I've seen the way my company conducts interviews, and I'm not sure I could pass it myself after 15 years on the job. Yet, my company would be very unlikely to let me go. Why? Because of my work ethic and the fact that I get shit done, which are qualities that are a little harder to suss out in an interview.

I'm my case Senior Engineer, C++, low latency.

I don't even care about the linked list debate. I just felt it was a bit dismissive to say, "whatever is working for you", as if there are software jobs where actually getting stuff done and solving problems are not valued.

I've worked with plenty of people who talk a good game and can pass an interview but in the end have very little output or lack the ability to solve a vexing production problem.

Never said you were a random dummy, don't think anyone did. Rattling off your credentials feels a bit defensive, and I took your response to be condescending. Maybe that's me, and it made my comment non-constructive. I apologize.

That is a great question. It poses a real problem the developer might come across, gives them space to answer and explain why. "Build me a linked list" only answers has the developer memorized how to build a linked list. Which is why I feel it is useless.

Never said linked lists and data structures are useless, so not sure if you are responding to me at this point.

Have a nice day.

Preeeetty sure everyone still reading this sees the dick measuring.

Anyways, more bumps for the job listing!

I wouldn't ordinarily "jump in" (Xbox 360 reference) but lurking (reading) reminds me of the time honored C/C++ argument.

Is it:

if (condition) {
}

Or:

if (condition)
{
}

So? Which is it?

IMHO: Like many things in life, there is often no right or wrong. There is only what works for you. The biggest and most important thing (in my experience) is to listen to all arguments and try to understand all the viewpoints. A lot of "arguments" are often rooted in religious (metaphorically speaking - been doing it this way for many years and there's nothing better) or political (need to use a certain technology for business) reasons.

When I last interviewed with a company (years ago) they ask me if I knew what a DAG is. So ... what's a DAG? More importantly, who cares?

Knowing that a linked list is not the correct data structure, and why, is the critical piece of information. You can know that, explain that, without having to build a custom linked list implementation in a test.

I guess my point isn't going through, either because I am not explaining it well or you are choosing not to see it.

However as Aurich pointed out, the whole discussion's only merit is bumping this thread. So..BUMP!

DAG

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lol, yeah, or even more important: Tab characters or spaces for indentation? Can start a holy war.

This thread inspired me to try this out

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