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Not really. If anything it just makes coding challenges useless for distinguishing between people who can think, and people who can regurgitate. It's one thing

Not really. If anything it just makes coding challenges useless for distinguishing between people who can think, and people who can regurgitate. It's one thing to "know" how to balance a binary tree because you've read up on and practiced the most common challenges - it's something else entirely to actually think through and understand a problem, then come up with a solution. I'd much rather have someone who can describe the edge cases and the complexity of a problem but get the final solution slightly wrong (but hey, the know the edge cases so can write tests for it, right?), than someone who can regurgitate code they've written before without really understanding it.

gigatexal 10y ago
Sure I agree as well. That there are so many resources and tools available to answer these coding challenges that if for whatever reason such a challenge was presented the minimum is to be able to answer thr challenge. Going beyond would be to know when to use such a data structure or its inherent strengths and weaknesses etc.
- bigmanwalter 10y ago
  Unless someone can't study these things because they're too busy writing real-world code.
  - gigatexal 10y ago
    Which is why I think companies doing less whiteboard interviews and more real world coding tests make more sense. I think one could understand the limitations of a linked list and still use the built in data structures and be really competent.
eriknstr 10y ago
>It's one thing to "know" how to balance a binary tree because you've read up on and practiced the most common challenges - it's something else entirely to actually think through and understand a problem, then come up with a solution. There are too many things to know in the world in order to be able to know them all as deeply as we wish. For the things that we can get away with knowing the most common aspects of, time might be better spent elsewhere than to learn more about that thing.

gigatexal 10y ago

Sure I agree as well. That there are so many resources and tools available to answer these coding challenges that if for whatever reason such a challenge was presented the minimum is to be able to answer thr challenge. Going beyond would be to know when to use such a data structure or its inherent strengths and weaknesses etc.

bigmanwalter 10y ago
Unless someone can't study these things because they're too busy writing real-world code.
- gigatexal 10y ago
  Which is why I think companies doing less whiteboard interviews and more real world coding tests make more sense. I think one could understand the limitations of a linked list and still use the built in data structures and be really competent.

eriknstr 10y ago

>It's one thing to "know" how to balance a binary tree because you've read up on and practiced the most common challenges - it's something else entirely to actually think through and understand a problem, then come up with a solution. There are too many things to know in the world in order to be able to know them all as deeply as we wish. For the things that we can get away with knowing the most common aspects of, time might be better spent elsewhere than to learn more about that thing.