Sorting is fundamental. Quicksort is not. It’s a single algorithm out of many. Quick, without looking it up, in 45 minutes, write an implementation of CC-Rad

Sorting is fundamental. Quicksort is not. It’s a single algorithm out of many. Quick, without looking it up, in 45 minutes, write an implementation of CC-Radix, cache-conscience radix sort. It is a sort, it deals with performance, therefore it’s fundamental, right? After all, in my last Google and Facebook interviews, the questions were all about performance. While we’re talking about performance, let’s talk about cache. It’s a fundamental part of computing after all. I tell you that you can pick any architecture you like, except one that is four way set-associative. What percentage of candidates can answer that? 50? 25? What percentage who did not go to certain schools can answer that? Of those who could answer it, how many saw this issue ever come up? I love hardware, but these days most things are out of my control. Either I’m running on my Mac or on some VM instance I didn’t spin up. Our field is VAST. It is a natural tendency to be biased towards what you know. Many things can be argued to be fundamental, even writing AND, OR, NOR, and NOT gates from NAND. That’s about as fundamental as it gets. It provides zero insight into the candidate for most groups.