Re:Facebook senior software engineer interview
by tantalor on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @10:30AM
(#25658571)
> Why is vaguely recalling an algorithm studied years prior and needing to look it up indicative of a poor candidate in an interview?
The article does not imply that it does.
Re:Facebook senior software engineer interview
by blonde_ocean on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @10:37AM
(#25658620)
The article doesn’t but I think OP’s point was that relying on knowledge / algorithms designed and provided by others would mean an immediate fail in a FAANG interview, but it’s exactly what successful engineers do when employed at FAANGs.
As soon as we settled on the problem to be solved, I ran to my nearest copy of Knuth's _Seminumerical Algorithms_ (having copies of Knuth's three volumes both at home and at work has been well worth the investment). Because I had studied the book carefully a decade earlier, I vaguely recalled that it contained several algorithms for problems like this. After spending a few minutes considering several possible designs that we'll study shortly, I realized that Algorithm S in Knuth's Section 3.4.2 was the ideal solution to my problem.
Why is vaguely recalling an algorithm studied years prior and needing to look it up indicative of a poor candidate in an interview?