Gauges their seniority level: more senior folks can talk deeply about a wider variety of topics.ģ. Keeps the topic on something they are presumably comfortable with.Ģ. There are a lot of benefits to this approach:ġ. I then choose points to stop them (either randomly or if I know a lot about the subtopic) and dig deeper and see where their comfort level lies. ![]() Personally, yes - I like asking about high-level run-downs of a project on their resume. I won't argue that asking questions about obscure algorithms isn't a problem, but good interviewers aren't asking questions that need obscure algorithms, they are asking questions that need algorithms like DFS, basic variations of sorting, and basic DP problems. Data structure questions rarely ask you to implement some data structure from scratch, they ask you to look at a problem and figure out which data structure best lends itself to the solution. Of course not many people are implementing skip lists from scratch in their everyday job, that's why in the list of 500 questions none of them are "Implement a skip list". Good software development owes NOTHING to data structure knowledge? Choosing the right data structure is critical for software that performs well (or performs at all once you get to a certain scale), and demonstrating knowledge of various data structures shows at least that a candidate knows a bit about which tools they have available to them on the job. While I don't think that the current state of interviewing is perfect, this statement is pretty out there. Instead, writing good software requires the ability to maintain a system, to debug problems, and to give constructive code review. This knowledge can't hurt but very few jobs or languages require you build a skip list from scratch. ![]() >Today, I recognize that good software development owes nothing to data structure knowledge or obscure algorithms. There are maybe 4 proper experts on the planet.) Like you can teach that language in a semester-please. (Though maybe about as absurd as one interviewer digging for any formal training I might have had in C++. Though not quite as bad as a friend failing an interview for not using a hash table, even though the answer he described was a hash table-just with the identity function as the hash. Sometimes I lose and the interviewer is clearly trying to guide me to the answer they want to see and I have no idea what they're getting at. Sometimes I don't know what they're going for but come up with a reasonable answer anyway and the interviewer is thrilled I managed to have an independent thought. ![]() Sometimes I win the algorithm lottery and have had reason to implement the obvious solution myself at least once, and the interviewer learns my memory works. How this plays in interviews is interesting for just how inconsistent it is. For functional purposes, I consider myself to know something if I could page in the details well enough to implement it in 5 minutes with Wikipedia or less.
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