Re:Data structures and algorithms I actually used while work...
by musicale on Sunday July 19, 2020 @07:47PM
(#23893383)
> That's not what I see in practice though. Not remembering the whole algorithm at best ends up wasting half of the interview (code the remainder in 20 minutes??), and at worst gets explicit language from the interviewer like "TC couldn't figure out <insert tricky algorithm> and I had to explain the algorithm to them explicitly, WEAK/BORDERLINE on algorithms".
It is kind of hilarious to get an algorithm problem which took eminent computer scientists years to solve the first time. "Why yes, I am Donald Knuth/Edsger Dijkstra/et al. – only smarter, luckier, and much faster!"
As you note, the initial question is basically "how well do you recall the solution to this problem?"
That's not what I see in practice though. Not remembering the whole algorithm at best ends up wasting half of the interview (code the remainder in 20 minutes??), and at worst gets explicit language from the interviewer like "TC couldn't figure out <insert tricky algorithm> and I had to explain the algorithm to them explicitly, WEAK/BORDERLINE on algorithms".
I should also say, I dislike doing any engineer interviews that are purely talk-about-algorithm without any code, because I've interviewed a disturbingly large number of candidates who cannot write about 10 lines of mostly-bug-free code with a single state variable and like one loop, in 30+ minutes.