Re:Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters
by dlubarov on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @05:29PM
(#13700713)
I do like your suggestion, but
> Make the interview more about working together and capacity to learn, and less about computer science trivia night at the pub with no beer.
Understanding b-trees is pretty useful. If you work with relational databases, most questions concerning query performance require some understanding of b-trees.
I wouldn't ask a candidate to implement b-trees (or a sorting algorithm, or red-black trees, etc.), but asking about their basic properties seems reasonable. Or better yet, asking about the performance of a realistic SQL query which uses a b-tree index.
> Make the interview more about working together and capacity to learn, and less about computer science trivia night at the pub with no beer.
Understanding b-trees is pretty useful. If you work with relational databases, most questions concerning query performance require some understanding of b-trees.
I wouldn't ask a candidate to implement b-trees (or a sorting algorithm, or red-black trees, etc.), but asking about their basic properties seems reasonable. Or better yet, asking about the performance of a realistic SQL query which uses a b-tree index.