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This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.
by mav3rick 8y ago
This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.
- ojr 8y agoThe creator of ruby on rails wouldn't pass a whiteboard interview. Ruby on Rails had more of an impact at Twitter, Github, Airbnb than BFS is my guess DHH's tweet https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1085987159406927872 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1085987159406927872
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hungryhobo 8y agoi mean if had to choose between no graph theory vs no ruby on rails...i would probably go with no ruby on rails
- kamarg 8y agoWhat if you had to choose between someone with a proven track record of building high quality software used by millions of people who has also shown they're capable of leading groups of people in successful projects but hasn't memorized the specific algorithm you asked about and another candidate who doesn't have as good of a track record but can totally nail that easy algorithm you asked for? Edit: Typos.
- mav3rick 8y agoYou think every candidate who comes in is like this. There are anomalies and outliers. The truth is resume padding is so common in the valley. Everyone can just say all these things. It's very hard to hire like this.
- kamarg 8y agoI don't work in SV. I assume it's like everywhere else where a potential employee who feels their skills are weak will take credit for things done by their teammates even if they were only tangentially involved. My above comment was strictly related to the idea that DHH shouldn't be considered for a job over anther candidate who is an unknown quantity simply because DHH apparently is not good at algorithm problems in interviews.
- hello_moto 8y agoWould you choose one-hit-wonder over proven engineers (Jeff Dean, Sanjay, other ex SUN microsystems folks?) that lead high-profile projects? I know that sounds rude... but one seems better to be a leader while others are better engineers would you agree?
- kamarg 8y agoTotal cop out answer but if DHH and people like Jeff Dean are both interviewing for a position with me you can be sure I'm doing everything I can to hire all of them. Even if it means starting entirely new departments. I'd totally fanboy and hire Jeff though if it came down to just one though.
- hello_moto 8y agoI don't mean to diminish/belittle DHH. What he's done (web framework, productivity SaaS, self-help books, sales/marketing, conference speakers, racing) it's not what Google does (web-browser, OS, AI, maps, search, scale, etc). I also don't get why people like DHH is assumed to be a "miss" for not being hired by some of these company... DHH is a unique individual with his own way of thinking. He wouldn't be DHH if he works for someone else (or under someone).
- kamarg 8y agoYou don't generally hire people like that to work for you on something specific. You hire them with a very broad goal and give them the resources to accomplish the task how they see fit. With a bit of nudging here and there you should end up with a very marketable outcome wether it's a product or a prestigious research division or widely used piece of software that everyone knows is associated with your company. What DHH does could absolutely be incorporated by Google. Angular => RoR, GCE => Saas, conference speakers => conference speakers. Anyway the point is that even at a company like Google there's plenty of room for people that haven't memorized algorithms and data structures but companies that only interview on these sorts of things are missing out on them because they seemingly don't care or haven't figured out how to interview someone substantially different from what they normally hire.
- base698 8y agoThere's a reason such tweets resonate so well: 1. Creator of top software project can't pass whiteboard interviews. 2. I can't pass whiteboard interviews. Therefore, they are stupid for not hiring me. It strokes everyone's inner narcissist--why spend the hours on leetcode, they are stupid anyway.
- stale2002 8y agoI wouldn't hire someone who cares so little about getting a job that he didn't spend the most basic amount of time studying for obvious questions that he was of course expected to be asked. Such a situation would show me that he either does not care about getting the job, or is so arogent that he automatically expected that people who throw job offers at him. That shows that this person has horrible personality problems and that I would not want to work with him, no matter how much he has accomplished in his life.
- Benjammer 8y agoI honestly don't mean this in a snide way. Can you give a few concrete examples of how a deep understanding of BFS that can't be googled and read in 10 minutes at the time you need it can help you ship profitable software products faster than your competitors?
- mav3rick 8y agoNo problem will present in such an easy way as "oh just apply BFS". As part of a big project you often have to use many different algorithms for sub parts, often modify them to suit constraints. I think the HN crowd is heavily inclined to web apps and also front end. I can't tell you how important fundamental CS knowledge is for backend. I bet you can't use a library or API for how caches work or when paging happens. Knowing these things makes you a well rounded engineer ready to tackle different problems. I can trust you to write a mobile app or work on some part of a self driving car because you have the building blocks to do so. Most of the comments in such threads have no interest in interesting and diverse jobs because "why bother, when will I use this". To any new grad, yes the interviews can be better but please spend time on these things at school. They are an investment in your career's stock.
- Benjammer 8y agoI mean, I've built and released multiple mobile apps (commercial and enterprise) on both platforms for multiple companies. They've all been mostly successful at doing what the company needed them to do. They look fairly nice as well. And I don't have this kind of fundamental, "what do you mean 'google it' are you a complete and total fucking moron!?" attitude about anything in software. I routinely browse through google results (mostly SO/Medium) about very basic concepts just to read the words again and re-warm those caches in my brain.
- saagarjha 8y agoIt’s possible to have to solve issues like this even inside of app development. Think back to every time your app has performed poorly: has there been any cases where you didn’t know how to make it faster without giving up in the way you had designed it? Maybe the app was reading from the disk to populate your data model, and that was too slow? Maybe you were performing an O(n) operation for each row in your table view?
- quickthrower2 8y agoBFS is common sense. It’s what you use when you’ve lost your car keys for example. Quickly check each room in the house, then if no luck go one layer deeper in each room.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dekhn 8y agouh, I thoroughly search each room, starting at the left corner and recursively iterating via a hilbert curve. doesn't everybody?
- ghaff 8y agoTwo different approaches. Each have their adherents. But when someone can’t find their phone or keys that that just had, they probably don’t start by ripping one room apart top to bottom.
- Rapzid 8y agoI would certainly probe deeper if given that as evidence for a strong grasp on the utility of BFS.
- quickthrower2 8y agoSo you’d do a DFS on a BFS
- magicalhippo 8y agoI didn't know about "BFS trees", do you have any references? I tried Googling but I could only find breadth-first searching (which I do know well, though apparently not the acronym BFS), but that's just a traversal algorithm.
- reggieband 8y agoBFS is "Breadth first search". One tree you would do this on is a BST or "Binary Search Tree". Probably OP got the acronyms mixed up.
- vishnugupta 8y agoThere's actually a thing called BFS tree. It's a tree that depicts the order of node expansion/visitation when a graph is traversed BFS. Even I wasn't aware of it until I recently read Peter Norvig's AI book. However, I'm not sure if the author referring this.
- magicalhippo 8y agoRight, since I didn't pick up on the acronym I thought I had missed something. Cheers!
- jenscow 8y ago> If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck I know. These people are expecting to be paid way above the average salary - I'd expect them to know the fundamentals, or (more importantly) be able to figure it out. "BFS?? I'd use a library for that" - well, thanks for that... instead of hiring you I'll just download some libraries instead.
- mav3rick 8y agoWatch me get downvoted to hell though :)