3 ms·
So are red-black trees, but almost no one has the rotation/rebalance algos memorized. Hell, even look at binary search: There are so many ways to go wrong. Th
by throwaway2037 2y ago
So are red-black trees, but almost no one has the rotation/rebalance algos memorized. Hell, even look at binary search: There are so many ways to go wrong. There is a famous blog post from Josh Bloch about it.
What will you say when you fail an interview over an "introductory data structures" problem?
The lack of humility makes me wonder...
- timr 2y agoSomeday I want to interview someone who really believes in this stuff, and ask them to regurgitate AVL tree node deletion from memory.
- throwaway2037 2y agoAnd, make sure they write unit tests for all of the tricky edge cases!
- BandButcher 2y agoso much this, I applied recently to a tech company which gave me 2 questions to complete within an hour. I knew the solution to the first was the min-cut algorithm, but no way I could code it straight up and down let alone in ~30min. Plus these leetcode-esque questions always come with millions of test cases making the need to be 100% exact and double check the constraints. I even had my data structures/algo book nearby on the shelf that I could've used to cheat this but that would've been a new low for me, especially considering this was for a "mid"-level position working on APIs/JS/SQL. I can understand if you want me to be an algorithm specialist but for web development for what im assuming would be a run of the mil SaaS application... this is absurd.
- throwaway2037 2y agoSorry for interview experience. It is definitely a buyer's market in US tech right now, so companies can wait as long as necessary to find their unicorn to write CRUD apps for less than 100K USD! The real question: If the tables were turned, could the interviewers pass their own tests? Probably not.