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> That, of course, would be absurd. If anyone is actually interviewing people that way, they're doing a terrible job. Perhaps you have never experienced that s

> That, of course, would be absurd. If anyone is actually interviewing people that way, they're doing a terrible job. Perhaps you have never experienced that sort of interview, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I was once asked a question where the solution involved implementing a trie. The naive design involves a 26-element array to hold all the possible next-letter entries, which obviously takes a huge amount of memory. The interviewer expected me to know the trivia answer on how to avoid allocating all that memory, and was clearly disappointed that I didn't know (using a linked list instead of a fixed-size array: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie#Implementation_strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie#Implementation_strategies). This was a principal engineer interviewing another principal engineer, FWIW. The company was Qualtrics, a survey/customer satisfaction company, not a bare-metal algorithms-heavy company. Obviously you've managed to have a successful career without encountering interview questions that hinge on algorithmic trivia, and I'm not doubting your experience. But saying "it's never happened to me so therefore it can't exist" isn't an especially strong argument.

jklm 5y ago
I’ve had this happen to me too. When I had only 2 years of experience, I was asked to code parallel dijkstra's in an interview. That startup shut its doors only 2 years later - guessing a hiring issue. But at the same time, saying “it happened to me once therefore it’s generally the case” isn’t a strong argument. I agree with the GP. I’m also a dropout, but am generally pretty good at navigating FANG-style questions, which are leetcode medium at worst. Often it feels like they’re ultimately testing for depth of understanding, flexibility, and creativity when coming up with an answer. It’s possible to brute-force your way through questions by rote memorization, but that’s going about it in the wrong spirit. And it feels like that's the gap when this topic comes up. Interviewing is a skill to a certain extent, with maybe a few days/interviews of warmups. But if you believe that your ability to land jobs is directly correlated to regurgitating leetcode hard questions, the outcome is almost predestined. If I had to sum up from personal experience: - Not every good leetcoder I know is a top engineer. - Every top engineer I know is a good (but not necessarily great!) leetcoder.

jklm 5y ago

I’ve had this happen to me too. When I had only 2 years of experience, I was asked to code parallel dijkstra's in an interview. That startup shut its doors only 2 years later - guessing a hiring issue. But at the same time, saying “it happened to me once therefore it’s generally the case” isn’t a strong argument. I agree with the GP. I’m also a dropout, but am generally pretty good at navigating FANG-style questions, which are leetcode medium at worst. Often it feels like they’re ultimately testing for depth of understanding, flexibility, and creativity when coming up with an answer. It’s possible to brute-force your way through questions by rote memorization, but that’s going about it in the wrong spirit. And it feels like that's the gap when this topic comes up. Interviewing is a skill to a certain extent, with maybe a few days/interviews of warmups. But if you believe that your ability to land jobs is directly correlated to regurgitating leetcode hard questions, the outcome is almost predestined. If I had to sum up from personal experience: - Not every good leetcoder I know is a top engineer. - Every top engineer I know is a good (but not necessarily great!) leetcoder.