Neural programmer better than Quicksort

Re:Neural programmer better than Quicksort by nardi on Friday July 10, 2020 @02:38PM (#23794797)

I may have been a little too harsh. Binary search is close to being a good interview question, especially since the algorithm does, rarely, come up in real code. But I prefer questions that are more like what people will be doing in their day-to-day job, and binary search is just a little too fiddly.

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Re:Neural programmer better than Quicksort by CamperBob2 on Friday July 10, 2020 @04:07PM (#23795815)

Me: "Show me a binary search in C on the whiteboard."

Candidate: bsearch(key, base, num, size, compare_fn);

Me: "Your offer should arrive within one to two weeks. Need any help with relocation expenses?"

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Re:Neural programmer better than Quicksort by nardi on Friday July 10, 2020 @04:21PM (#23795992)

100% this. Maybe not everyone knows the specific function you’re looking for, but for the ones that know standard library APIs really well, that’s your hire.

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Re:Neural programmer better than Quicksort by User23 on Friday July 10, 2020 @06:17PM (#23797222)

I wouldn’t say so. In theory you’d expect a FAANG engineer to be able to construct a correctly terminating loop by reasoning about the loop invariant, but in practice every single candidate gets lost in guesswork and messing up the edge cases and termination condition.

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