3 ms·

I wouldn't call it "trivia" but "fundamental knowledge". If the person you're interviewing went through college it should be easy. If they didn't, they probably

• brailsafe 5y ago
  It's not as much a question to me of whether they've ever seen it, wrote it, or studied it, it's whether they know off the top of their head even which one it is or what the implementation looks like.
• jjav 5y ago
  > I wouldn't call it "trivia" but "fundamental knowledge". Something that will never be needed in a career can hardly be called "fundamental knowledge". I don't remember anything about how merge sort works. If someone wanted to interview me on that, they'd convince themselves I can't code, despite decades of delivering production code. > If the person you're interviewing went through college it should be easy. I did study CS in university. A very top CS school, even (CMU). Probably I must've studied merge sort at some point, but the last algorithms class I took at CMU was almost 30 years ago. Not once have I needed that info since then, so it's long long forgotten. Its relevance to a software engineering career is nil.