Re:How to Pass a Programming Interview
by kevan on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @11:21PM
(#11250904)
Most of my work on an ecommerce platform doesn't need much attention to algorithmic complexity, but everyone on my team still curses the guy who wrote an O(n^4) algorithm in our checkout pipeline (discounts, promos, shipping, tax, etc). More than a couple items in your cart and you couldn't checkout because the thread would spin forever. I want to work with a team of people who can recognize these things immediately, even if it's not an absolute requirement for the job.
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Re:How to Pass a Programming Interview
by im_down_w_otp on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @10:27AM
(#11253474)
That has a lot more to do with mechanical sympathy, and awareness of when you've exchanged cleverness for complexity disguised as cleverness, than it does with knowing the big-O of operations on a datastructure.
What you want the person to identify is that they've made your simple iterative checkout process into multiple unbounded tree traversals with no circuit breaker.
Knowing that searching the tree is O(log(n)) isn't very helpful when your problem is an inability to identify that you've made (n) an unnecessarily huge problem space.