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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, h

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.)