Re:How to Pass a Programming Interview
by pessimizer on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @03:33PM
(#11248360)
Honestly, I consider an instinct for complexity analysis the most important thing I learned in school, and the thing that I've gotten the most use out of. I don't know what case you're making here: are you saying that high-level architecture is so hard that choosing a map or a hashmap should be a coinflip, or the one you see first? Having had some criteria for making the choice makes my life a lot better when everybody is panicking because something is running like shit and no one understands why.
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To me it was a bunch of rote memorization, just like a biology course. I never - never - have needed to know how bubblesort/heapsort/mergesort actually work, except to appease interviewers.
I'm not saying I'm pro writing-inefficient-code, but if you want to talk big-O during an interview, I"m going to roll my eyes about as much as you asking me who the 19th president was.
Re:How to Pass a Programming Interview
by democracy on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @08:19PM
(#11256853)
I ask such questions at the end of an interview, but mostly to see the sanity/reaction or thinking process - wrong answer would do, rolling eyes - would not :)
Oh shit, my code is O(1), looking at it in the profiler tells me that it's not a bottleneck (it says < 5ms). Yet this single function call somehow takes 78ms in wall time when it should at worst be 1ms (and even that is too much). The reason? JVM classloading/JITing. This quite annoying when you have shortlived applications.