Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters
<i>There is no point in giving me binary-tree-traversing questions; I don&#x27;t know those answers and will never be interested in learning them.</i><p>Let&#x27;s presume this is out of preference and not ability. It&#x27;s a pretty basic concept. If your <i>preference</i> stops you from learning something as basic as this as a programmer, then it doesn&#x27;t seem likely that you will be motivated to keep up with even more abstruse concepts.<p>Nearly every programmer nowadays knows that naive string concatenation is inefficient, and so they should use a stream or something like that. I&#x27;d rather hire someone who knows exactly why it&#x27;s O(n^2) and why adding to the end of an array that doubles when it expands is O(n) amortized. Why? Because a different but analogous situation might well come up in a programming job, and the person who likes to think about such things is more likely to spot the potential problem and avoid it altogether! The fact that the op would actually feature the above sentences as a large text excerpt sets off the &quot;Dunning-Kruger&quot; alarm for me.<p>That said, the op still has a good point. There is considerable organizational disconnect being displayed here. Those big companies would do well to have developers or a puzzle website do the initial filtering, rather than waste people&#x27;s time by alternatively telling them they&#x27;re supposedly wonderful, then supposedly horrible.