I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)
I bombed an interview at a game company because I gave a right answer that I couldn&#x27;t get them to understand.<p>I don&#x27;t remember the exact problem they wanted me to solve, but the answer involved a dynamic collection and they wanted it to grow with constant time complexity. They were probably looking for a linked list. But I said I&#x27;d use a dynamic array because those have constant time when averaged over a series of appends.<p>I don&#x27;t know if I remembered the term &quot;amortized complexity&quot; or not, but it was clear that they had never heard of doing amortized analysis across a series of operations and they absolutely did not get my answer. They got hung up on the idea that <i>some</i> appends force the array to grow and get copied. I tried to explain that that was only true for a predictable fraction of them, but they were stuck on the idea that this meant dynamic arrays had O(n) worst case performance. They clearly thought I didn&#x27;t know what the hell I was talking about.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure that was the point where they decided to pass on me.<p>But now I&#x27;m a senior software engineer at Google and I just finished writing a textbook that explains dynamic arrays including their amortized analysis, so joke&#x27;s on them.