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For #3, it’s not really a red flag. I am guessing you are a fairly recent grad? Most people who learn algos & DS never have to implement them on the job, and o

For #3, it’s not really a red flag. I am guessing you are a fairly recent grad? Most people who learn algos & DS never have to implement them on the job, and often haven’t actually written their own since their CS classes. If the question is any deeper than “what are some good and bad choices of algorithms for this problem”, you’re selecting more for who has just graduated or has been grinding leetcode and doesn’t have performance anxiety than you are for competence, expertise, and productivity. I know folks who got rejected from the leetcode companies and went on to build major products from scratch. The 0.5% of work that requires them to have to implement something like this manually, they’ll just grab their CLRS book and refresh their memory long enough to solve the problem and probably forget it again a week later. I also know folks at these companies who started fresh out of college, passed that style of interview, worked there for 7-10 years, moved up to senior or higher in the engineering track, and openly admit that they would be a deer in the headlights if they got any of the interview questions. Without going back to study and practice those, they know wouldn’t pass an interview for a junior dev, let alone one for their current job (where they are currently considered high performers). The big problem is that this style of interview filters for people who pass this style of interview, and then those new hires are asked to interview others, so they interviewed in the style that they were given and passed.

rococode 8y ago
Yeah, I'm currently a grad student so there's definitely some bias haha. The kind of question I had in mind would be along the lines of "say you have a tree, how could you find the nearest common ancestor of two nodes in that tree?". I actually got this question during an interview recently, and I felt it was of a suitable difficulty where I could figure out a solution without any specific knowledge other than what a tree is (which most developers should know). I'm sure I'm still young and naive, but my line of thinking is that a question like that is good for having a person show their thought process when figuring out a problem they haven't seen before. Design questions are a bit different because they tend to just require a rehash of a codebase you've worked with before.
- pmontra 8y ago
  A more realistic question is this. Italy is mandating XML business to business invoices starting from 2019-01-01. You're given the spec and a database schema. The question is "which fields are we missing and how should we ask customers for those information?" Extra bonus if you know GDPR and suggest which fields are sensible information, not that I'm expecting that somebody out of school can make that assessment. Algorithms, who cares. Maybe as a tie breaker.
- zimpenfish 8y ago
  In the 20+ years since I left university with a CS degree, not once have I directly used any of the algorithmic stuff I learnt commercially. (Obviously I've used sort routines in libraries.)

rococode 8y ago

Yeah, I'm currently a grad student so there's definitely some bias haha. The kind of question I had in mind would be along the lines of "say you have a tree, how could you find the nearest common ancestor of two nodes in that tree?". I actually got this question during an interview recently, and I felt it was of a suitable difficulty where I could figure out a solution without any specific knowledge other than what a tree is (which most developers should know). I'm sure I'm still young and naive, but my line of thinking is that a question like that is good for having a person show their thought process when figuring out a problem they haven't seen before. Design questions are a bit different because they tend to just require a rehash of a codebase you've worked with before.

pmontra 8y ago
A more realistic question is this. Italy is mandating XML business to business invoices starting from 2019-01-01. You're given the spec and a database schema. The question is "which fields are we missing and how should we ask customers for those information?" Extra bonus if you know GDPR and suggest which fields are sensible information, not that I'm expecting that somebody out of school can make that assessment. Algorithms, who cares. Maybe as a tie breaker.
zimpenfish 8y ago
In the 20+ years since I left university with a CS degree, not once have I directly used any of the algorithmic stuff I learnt commercially. (Obviously I've used sort routines in libraries.)