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What a typical, uninspired, and pretentious list. I've recently started to opt out of interviewing people because I'm often teamed with someone that will Google

by dvt 10y ago

What a typical, uninspired, and pretentious list. I've recently started to opt out of interviewing people because I'm often teamed with someone that will Google one of these, think they're some sort of genius, and proceed to make some poor twenty-year-old feel like a doofus for not knowing the algorithm for a convex hull. Speaking of which -- seriously? The only time I even had to LOOK at that algorithm was when I read a very old game programming book -- before I even went to college, mind you -- and generating pixel-perfect collisions for arbitrary polygons was one of the chapters (the game example was one of those meteor blaster clones). I have strong feelings about this and I think this article is a complete waste of time, not to mention lazy (it looks auto-generated, anyway) because it perpetuates the idea(l) of making the software engineer interview process as arcane and difficult as possible.

chadcmulligan 10y ago
maybe they want to skew their workforce to select for youngsters - recent grads would be best at these sort of things, cause as you say no-one writes these things in real life and if you do, you reach for the books. Glad those days are behind me, but it is a shame that this nonsense passes for interviewing.
- Clubber 10y ago
  I'm not sure if that is intentional or not, but these type of algorithms certainly favor someone who recently learned about them but hasn't had the experience to forget them. Because they are already incorporated into every framework that would use them, they are more "code trivia" for someone 10 years out of school.
DavidWoof 10y ago
For my part, I think the top few items on each group make for perfectly valid interview questions, but as we descend each list I agree with you more and more. Things like DFS, BFS, linked list insertion, binary search, et. al. should be barely more than typing for a good experienced developer. They consist of basic skills, only slightly above fizzbuzz level. Implementing "Heap Sort" OTOH just tests whether you've recently reviewed the Heap Sort algorithm, which seems completely irrelevant to me.

by dvt 10y ago

chadcmulligan 10y ago

maybe they want to skew their workforce to select for youngsters - recent grads would be best at these sort of things, cause as you say no-one writes these things in real life and if you do, you reach for the books. Glad those days are behind me, but it is a shame that this nonsense passes for interviewing.

Clubber 10y ago
I'm not sure if that is intentional or not, but these type of algorithms certainly favor someone who recently learned about them but hasn't had the experience to forget them. Because they are already incorporated into every framework that would use them, they are more "code trivia" for someone 10 years out of school.

DavidWoof 10y ago

For my part, I think the top few items on each group make for perfectly valid interview questions, but as we descend each list I agree with you more and more. Things like DFS, BFS, linked list insertion, binary search, et. al. should be barely more than typing for a good experienced developer. They consist of basic skills, only slightly above fizzbuzz level. Implementing "Heap Sort" OTOH just tests whether you've recently reviewed the Heap Sort algorithm, which seems completely irrelevant to me.