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@ericd, what programming roles don't deal with trees or recursion? I've dealt with trees in every single domain I've been in, frontend or backend, whether doin

@ericd, what programming roles don't deal with trees or recursion? I've dealt with trees in every single domain I've been in, frontend or backend, whether doing "real" programming or building with no-code tools like FileMaker. I've seen admins and accountants build trees and recursion with spreadsheets. I don't think these things are as "gatekeeping" as you imagine.

nostrebored 7y ago
I don't think people understand that when you work at scale, efficient data structures and algorithms actually matter. I doubt there are many positions in Google that don't fundamentally require the ability to understand both.
NhanH 7y ago
Since all programming jobs deal with trees and recursion, and if you are already at Google working on another team, wouldn't it mean you already know about those (since our assumption being all jobs deal with those)? Why not just check directly if you were actually useful instead?
- tcoff91 7y ago
  It's 100% not true that all programming jobs deal with trees. I worked for years on a major audio/video/screensharing communications SaaS product and never once needed to write recursive code or use a tree structure. Not all code is for processing data. There was tons of code that had very little to do with data structures or algorithms, and much more to do with implementing network protocols, business logic, managing state, abstracting the differences between the various operating systems we had to support, etc...
  - NhanH 7y ago
    I was just taking GP's statement and shows that it is not consistent with the rest of his argument. I don't agree that all jobs have to deal with trees either.
ericd 7y ago
They're both occasionally the best tool for the job, but I think they're hugely overrepresented in that type of interview. I haven't found that they come up very often in most web development, as an example, but they definitely come up in interviews for web developers.
ansgri 7y ago
Trees as data structures are inevitable. Did you have to balance them or perform other nontrivial graph theoretic transformations though?

nostrebored 7y ago

I don't think people understand that when you work at scale, efficient data structures and algorithms actually matter. I doubt there are many positions in Google that don't fundamentally require the ability to understand both.

NhanH 7y ago

Since all programming jobs deal with trees and recursion, and if you are already at Google working on another team, wouldn't it mean you already know about those (since our assumption being all jobs deal with those)? Why not just check directly if you were actually useful instead?

tcoff91 7y ago
It's 100% not true that all programming jobs deal with trees. I worked for years on a major audio/video/screensharing communications SaaS product and never once needed to write recursive code or use a tree structure. Not all code is for processing data. There was tons of code that had very little to do with data structures or algorithms, and much more to do with implementing network protocols, business logic, managing state, abstracting the differences between the various operating systems we had to support, etc...
- NhanH 7y ago
  I was just taking GP's statement and shows that it is not consistent with the rest of his argument. I don't agree that all jobs have to deal with trees either.

ericd 7y ago

They're both occasionally the best tool for the job, but I think they're hugely overrepresented in that type of interview. I haven't found that they come up very often in most web development, as an example, but they definitely come up in interviews for web developers.

ansgri 7y ago

Trees as data structures are inevitable. Did you have to balance them or perform other nontrivial graph theoretic transformations though?