4 ms·
> If you “get stuck”, what are you going to do when you bump up against your limitations at work? If I got stuck on finding whether a linked list had a cycle i
by pcwalton 7y ago
> If you “get stuck”, what are you going to do when you bump up against your limitations at work?
If I got stuck on finding whether a linked list had a cycle in it, I would Google for "how to determine whether a linked list has a cycle in it". Ironically, that's the one thing I'm not allowed to do in a coding interview.
In fact, trying to invent something from first principles as you're theoretically supposed to do in an interview would be a waste of my employer's time.
- Grue3 7y agoWhat are you going to do when the solution to your problem is not on Google/Stack Overflow? Give up? If you're only going to code things that have already been coded, and can be accessed merely by Googling, then what's the point of your job?
- erikpukinskis 7y agoWhat do you do when Google doesn’t have a good answer? The point is I can easily fill an hour applying different debugging and learning techniques that have a chance at getting me unstuck. That’s one of the things that makes me a good programmer.
- usaar333 7y agoRealistically, you'd walk the list with a visited set and validate you didn't visit a node twice. This would solve your problem in any realistic use case and you'd never even recognize a constant space solution was possible.