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> I don't use it anymore because it's too common to be useful. I've found that having common questions used across many interviews allows for more objective di

• beagle3 9y ago
  It was never my only question.. I vary through the years. Another favourite of mine is basically "implement a very sparse 100Mx100M matrix". Thought process much more important than result. (important things to consider: access time, storage size, static vs. dynamic, use cases, adversarial coordinate selection). I actually consider the "cycles in the input" question a bit of a trick question -- I calibrated the test on people I knew were good, and no one who didn't know it already was able to come up with "the trick" in reasonable-settings-for-interview-time, and not many were able to come up with any O(1)space O(n)time solution. The discussion with those who don't know the solution is useful, of course.
  • derf_ 9y ago
    > The discussion with those who don't know the solution is useful, of course. Agreed, the discussion on these questions is the whole point, not whether you can come up with a "correct" solution (and I tell candidates this up front). I generally draw a small example input with a cycle, and ask what their list-reversing solution will do with it, which I feel makes it much less of a trick question. "Can you work out what the code you just wrote will do with inputs that don't meet the assumptions you made?" seems like a fair thing to ask anyone who will be required to write code that handles untrusted data.