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It's really not a red flag. Not knowing or having BFS memorized does not indicate that one can't implement it relatively quickly by refreshing oneself on the al
by jmathai 11y ago
It's really not a red flag. Not knowing or having BFS memorized does not indicate that one can't implement it relatively quickly by refreshing oneself on the algorithms.
Unless, of course, you mean if all academic papers and material that describe BFS suddenly vanished and you had to come up with a solution yourself in 30 minutes with someone looking over your back. In that case, I agree, it's a red flag for whatever position you're interviewing for.
- Xyik 11y agoWhere do you draw the line then? You can google and stack-overflow answers to pretty much any technical interview question that has a non-subjective answer. BFS is not much more than a loop, a queue and a set to keep track of state (which nodes to visit next and which nodes have been visited). I can't think of many algorithms simpler than that to ask outside of things like fizz-buzz. If you are arguing for whether algorithms are an effective way to gauge a candidate's skill then you should state that.