4 ms·
> When there's no difference between cramming for your History 101 mid-term and a technical interview for a software developer, we're not in a good spot. Your
by sidlls 9y ago
> When there's no difference between cramming for your History 101 mid-term and a technical interview for a software developer, we're not in a good spot.
Your "1 million strings" example is exactly the kind of thing that can be memorized, and is actually a quite common class of interview questions in certain segments of this industry. It's also only tangentially related to engineering. If I may, I'd draw an analogy with engineering a satellite system: your "million strings" example is more like the act of selecting a bolt from a catalog that fits the spec than it is engineering the spec in the first place.
- Hydraulix989 9y agoWhich is fine because something like searching through a million strings is very much an actual problem that would be faced on-the-job -- usually the spec is already written and handed to you by your manager -- and we can all agree that being able to recall obscure syntactical knowledge or invert a binary tree are things that, while commonly asked in whiteboard interviews, aren't something an actual software engineer would ever be faced with in their daily work.