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I never remember the nitty-gritty details of the more complex algorithms and data structures, I only remember they exist and their important properties. If I th

I never remember the nitty-gritty details of the more complex algorithms and data structures, I only remember they exist and their important properties. If I then have to implement one, I consult google or books. Googling often has the neat side effect that you'll sometimes find refinements/improvements or other (new) potentially better algorithms to solve a particular problem. Or somebody might have done the heavy lifting already and packaged it up under a compatible license (if it isn't something simple like leftPad). I mean, it's OK to ask for basic algorithms in interviews, to see if the interviewee has at least some understanding of basic stuff and/or can think on their feet and/or can reason about problems appropriately... But I would still welcome it if instead of giving an interviewee a boring, memorizable problem like "invert a binary tree", the interviewer would find a more general problem and would see how the employee would tackle it, and if the interviewee refers to binary trees as part of the solution without writing out a full implementation from memory that's OK (as long as binary trees would be a valid approach to solve the problem, of course).

fernandotakai 6y ago
> the interviewer would find a more general problem and would see how the employee would tackle it those are the best interviews imho. specially when both the candidate and the interviewer engage into a productive discussion about the solution the candidate gave. at the same time, those take time and a lot of companies want a "fast" hiring pipeline, which leads to "invert a binary tree on this whiteboard!".
strulovich 6y ago
Just for reference, my company does not ask anyone to implement a binary tree or any well known algorithms in coding interviews. I see a bunch of comments that look to me as strawman, or really bad interview experience. A good coding interview should: - not be known by the interviewee if they spent even a few weeks on leetcode - avoid requiring anything that isn’t covered in an average CS101 class - draw its challenges from the need to process a new problem, and gradually uncover the edge cases in it and how to handle them gracefully. I don’t do leetcode. But went now and tried the first hard question I found. It was “find the median of two sorted arrays”. I find this question to be a good example of very little background knowledge needed. (You’d need to know how to deal with arrays, and what’s a median - not everyone will know these, but it’s a pretty low bar) This question already has plenty of room for mistakes, edge cases and problem solving. I’m going to take a wild guess from knowing talented veteran engineers I’ve seen that they can surely handle it in the interview structures I’ve experienced.

fernandotakai 6y ago

> the interviewer would find a more general problem and would see how the employee would tackle it those are the best interviews imho. specially when both the candidate and the interviewer engage into a productive discussion about the solution the candidate gave. at the same time, those take time and a lot of companies want a "fast" hiring pipeline, which leads to "invert a binary tree on this whiteboard!".

strulovich 6y ago

Just for reference, my company does not ask anyone to implement a binary tree or any well known algorithms in coding interviews. I see a bunch of comments that look to me as strawman, or really bad interview experience. A good coding interview should: - not be known by the interviewee if they spent even a few weeks on leetcode - avoid requiring anything that isn’t covered in an average CS101 class - draw its challenges from the need to process a new problem, and gradually uncover the edge cases in it and how to handle them gracefully. I don’t do leetcode. But went now and tried the first hard question I found. It was “find the median of two sorted arrays”. I find this question to be a good example of very little background knowledge needed. (You’d need to know how to deal with arrays, and what’s a median - not everyone will know these, but it’s a pretty low bar) This question already has plenty of room for mistakes, edge cases and problem solving. I’m going to take a wild guess from knowing talented veteran engineers I’ve seen that they can surely handle it in the interview structures I’ve experienced.