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> There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them. They are just look
by soheil 10y ago
> There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don't know those answers and will never be interested in learning them.
They are just looking for smart people. If you ever looked it up it's 5 lines of code. That's the whole point they're not forcing you to learn something:
A) so esoteric you will never encounter in your programming career
B) so complicated that you'd have to spend days practicing it, etc
In my opinion a lot of these questions are disguised IQ tests wrapped in algorithms since they can't blatantly ask "brain teaser" questions anymore.
- pjmlp 10y agoYou mean like the famous inverting tree whiteboard exercise that the Homebrew author failed? Which lead them to refuse to give a job to the guy that actually developed a software used by those with higher IQ to come up with tree inversion algorithms?
- soheil 10y agoYes, I completely agree with you that their recruiting system has a lot of false positives, but I was just clarify that algorithm questions are really IQ questions, which is as you rightly point out is a flawed proxy for predicting how well someone will perform in their role.
- hocuspocus 10y agoThey can definitely ask brain teasers, they decided to stop because it proved useless. Some questions are fair, but there's a reason most candidates spend weeks/months practicing. Good luck pulling off something like a topological sort if you haven't studied the algorithm recently.
- unprepare 10y ago>If you ever looked it up it's 5 lines of code. multiply that 5 lines of code by all the possible algorithms they couldve asked about instead of this one. Thats what you need to know walking into the interview, seems kinda stupid