Re:Ask HN: Can engineers from Google or Facebook solve white...
by kamaal on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @12:52PM
(#17759569)
>>I used to work at a company where some guys spent literally weeks inventing a fast way to do a dot product over huge vectors.
Very nice that you bought up this point. This is exactly what I was trying to point out. If a team of full time working people took weeks to arrive at a working solution, despite a massive body of open knowledge available as a reference to prior solutions, there is absolutely no way a candidate can give even arrive at a decent direction to the solution in under 45 minutes in a interview situation.
No one is saying algorithms are not useful.
But there is a very big difference between knowing an algorithm and inventing an algorithm. Testing the former is no indication of the latter, as illustrated by your own example.
Very nice that you bought up this point. This is exactly what I was trying to point out. If a team of full time working people took weeks to arrive at a working solution, despite a massive body of open knowledge available as a reference to prior solutions, there is absolutely no way a candidate can give even arrive at a decent direction to the solution in under 45 minutes in a interview situation.
No one is saying algorithms are not useful.
But there is a very big difference between knowing an algorithm and inventing an algorithm. Testing the former is no indication of the latter, as illustrated by your own example.