3 ms·
My read was that he froze during the interview. Perhaps I was injecting my own experience, which once very literally went like this : interviewer : "what's the
by doktrin 14y ago
My read was that he froze during the interview. Perhaps I was injecting my own experience, which once very literally went like this :
interviewer : "what's the time complexity of blah"
me : "hmm... O(1)"
interviewer : "what's the space complexity?"
me : "fuck, oh, I don't know"
interviewer : "well, think about it. no stress"
me (2 seconds later) : "oh, right, yeah, O(n)... of course"
Not saying I'm proud of not taking the time to think a problem through, but sometimes people act really weird when under the gun.
- pacaro 14y agoI'm drawn to this for several reasons... Trite though it is, admitting that you don't know truly is on the path to wisdom. Not taking time to think things through is endemic in the workplace, not just an interview quirk. in the real world, many O(N) algorithms are in fact O(I don't know) because of unexpected or unpredicted behavior from language, compiler, interpreter, runtime, os, etc.