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Interviews which have you rebalancing trees and what not are really just legally safe IQ tests. They purport to be testing skills, but nobody really cares if y

by tsotha 11y ago

Interviews which have you rebalancing trees and what not are really just legally safe IQ tests. They purport to be testing skills, but nobody really cares if you can implement a search algorithm - 99.9% of the time you're going to make a library call to do that. They do care to hire the kind of people that are smart enough to do that kind of thing, though.

chrischen 11y ago
Implement a search algorithm in 30 minutes!
- shmerl 11y ago
  Yeah, something that took years for others to come up with. It's completely pointless on an interview. It's like asking to invent something on the spot.
- fho 11y ago
  Define "search algorithm" ... simple breadth- or depth-first set membership queries are easily doable in under 30 minutes. Edit: I don't want to defend such questions in interviews ... it's just that almost everybody has done something like this at some point. It should be easily doable.
  - Corrado 11y ago
    Yes, I've implemented several search algorithms in the past, but that was over 20 years ago, in school. I've used libraries ever since for doing mundane things like this. While I know the general idea around search algorithms, and given some Google time I could tell you which one to use in a certain scenerio and probably even whiteboard one, it's not currently "easily doable" for me to pop one out on the spot. Does that disqualify me? What about the fact that I wrote an image processing army to churn through 4.5MM images in a weekend? I didn't write the thumbnailing algorithm (yea, GraphicsMagick) but I did write a GraphicsMagick Ruby gem to work with data in-memory instead of writing to disk. Could I do it again, in an interview, on a whiteboard. Probably not, but I didn't do like that in my real job either.
  - chrischen 11y ago
    Well I'd probably fail that question, but then again they probably wouldn't want to hire me as a code monkey anyways.

by tsotha 11y ago

chrischen 11y ago

Implement a search algorithm in 30 minutes!

shmerl 11y ago
Yeah, something that took years for others to come up with. It's completely pointless on an interview. It's like asking to invent something on the spot.
fho 11y ago
Define "search algorithm" ... simple breadth- or depth-first set membership queries are easily doable in under 30 minutes. Edit: I don't want to defend such questions in interviews ... it's just that almost everybody has done something like this at some point. It should be easily doable.
- Corrado 11y ago
  Yes, I've implemented several search algorithms in the past, but that was over 20 years ago, in school. I've used libraries ever since for doing mundane things like this. While I know the general idea around search algorithms, and given some Google time I could tell you which one to use in a certain scenerio and probably even whiteboard one, it's not currently "easily doable" for me to pop one out on the spot. Does that disqualify me? What about the fact that I wrote an image processing army to churn through 4.5MM images in a weekend? I didn't write the thumbnailing algorithm (yea, GraphicsMagick) but I did write a GraphicsMagick Ruby gem to work with data in-memory instead of writing to disk. Could I do it again, in an interview, on a whiteboard. Probably not, but I didn't do like that in my real job either.
- chrischen 11y ago
  Well I'd probably fail that question, but then again they probably wouldn't want to hire me as a code monkey anyways.