3 ms·
Seems like a great question to ask if you want to find out if a candidate has taken courses similar to you or has seen this problem before.
by benihana 12y ago
Seems like a great question to ask if you want to find out if a candidate has taken courses similar to you or has seen this problem before.
- kajecounterhack 12y agoMaybe unintentional (and not saying if this is good or bad) but it is a little self-selecting: by asking you can tell "Ok so candidate x has had this kind of educational background and at least has heard of the name which might correlate with traits y or z"
- gt565k 12y agoor knows about space-time complexity and why dynamic programming is important when dealing with problems such as this that might involve large data sets...
- norseboar 12y agoThere seems to be a connotation that asking a question "just to see if the candidate has seen the problem before" is bad, for some reason (apologies if this connotation wasn't there). This is actually a very important thing to look for in an interview. While it might not be "fair" in the sense that not all smart people can effectively answer it, it's absolutely effective to sort out who has a good grasp of algorithms (and memoization in particular). There are too many smart people out there to interview just for that; you've got to look for existing knowledge too.
- kasey_junk 12y agoThere are definitely times in your hiring process when you want to bias towards people with existing knowledge. The problem with this particular question is that it doesn't imply any in depth knowledge of dynamic programming. It is literally something you can see in a survey of algorithms course. So by asking this question, I suspect you are biasing towards people who have recently taken a survey of algorithms course. I'm having a hard time envisioning the hiring situation where I'd want that bias.