Whiteboard Interviews Suck, Get Good at Them Anyway

Re:Whiteboard Interviews Suck, Get Good at Them Anyway by UncleMeat on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @04:37PM (#14501078)

I don't expect them to remember textbook details either. But I expect people to know how to manipulate and understand an unfamiliar data structure or understand when a given data structure is appropriate for a particular problem domain. I expect people to understand (or be able to derive) when memoization is appropriate. I expect people to understand (or be able to derive) how using different data structures or representations of these data structures might affect memory layout and cache performance.

That's essential stuff, not something to be dismissed as "textbook details".

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Re:Whiteboard Interviews Suck, Get Good at Them Anyway by falcolas on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @04:48PM (#14501200)

Sure, but my experience searching for jobs indicates that those forms of questions are very rarely asked. Instead, questions like "in a N dimensional space filled with M points, find the point(s) closest to a given point" or "figure out if this list of pointers has a loop", or "implement quicksort in Java".

If you don't use these as your whiteboard questions, great. But I've not run into you or others like you in my own searching.

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