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I haven't written a sorting method in years and couldn't remember it on the spot in 10 minutes, despite having analyzed the big ones 6 years ago. Yet, I have no

I haven't written a sorting method in years and couldn't remember it on the spot in 10 minutes, despite having analyzed the big ones 6 years ago. Yet, I have no problem creating a giant, modular, cookie-cutter enterprise structure, which is generally more sought after and something many hardcore leets seem to struggle with, especially once it comes down to doing more than just a fancy UML graph. We really don't need True Scotsmans on this site.

hiq 6y ago
Again, you can make it a newbie question by just accepting any sort, including one you come up with on your own (so no need to remember). I'm sure you can design your own sort given enough time, granted 10 minutes might be too short to get it nice and clean, but with a bit more you're on the level of difficulty of fizzbuzz. To make my point clear, you can implement a dumb and inefficient sort by implementing a min function, taking this min, then iteratively call it on what's left of the array and append the values to a new array which you then return. That won't get you into FAANGM, but maybe that's enough to get some discussion started in an interview at a company that's not too much into leetcode and is trying to evaluate other skills like communication. And I do think that 99% of people who write code every week could come up with something like this or better fairly quickly.
- fossuser 6y ago
  That's reasonable to me if that's the standard. The reason I jumped to quicksort in my initial reply is any sort short of quick or merge sort (or some other nlogn variant) would fail you at FAANG. You could do the naive n^2, but it better only be in the first two min and hand waved off as obviously inefficient, almost a joke that you implemented it at all on the way to writing the nlogn version, bonus points if you talk about how merge sort is nlogn in worst case and quicksort is n squared in the worst case, but in practice often faster.

hiq 6y ago

Again, you can make it a newbie question by just accepting any sort, including one you come up with on your own (so no need to remember). I'm sure you can design your own sort given enough time, granted 10 minutes might be too short to get it nice and clean, but with a bit more you're on the level of difficulty of fizzbuzz. To make my point clear, you can implement a dumb and inefficient sort by implementing a min function, taking this min, then iteratively call it on what's left of the array and append the values to a new array which you then return. That won't get you into FAANGM, but maybe that's enough to get some discussion started in an interview at a company that's not too much into leetcode and is trying to evaluate other skills like communication. And I do think that 99% of people who write code every week could come up with something like this or better fairly quickly.

fossuser 6y ago
That's reasonable to me if that's the standard. The reason I jumped to quicksort in my initial reply is any sort short of quick or merge sort (or some other nlogn variant) would fail you at FAANG. You could do the naive n^2, but it better only be in the first two min and hand waved off as obviously inefficient, almost a joke that you implemented it at all on the way to writing the nlogn version, bonus points if you talk about how merge sort is nlogn in worst case and quicksort is n squared in the worst case, but in practice often faster.