Data structures and algorithms interview questions and their solutions
Dear HN,<p>Please stop telling companies not to use this method of interview.<p>Sincerely, Michael.<p>I use it to filter myself out before wasting anyone's time.<p>What I see here is an AND gate, and their use of this process itself triggers the false in my own filters-for-job-positions system.<p>I see it as an uniform filter. The company is filtering me out, or in. And, if I understand the reality of their options for filtering methods, I can use that information to filter them back. Interestingly enough, this one is pretty uniform for me, if they use the method of out-of-a-book problems in either an on-the-whiteboard or pair-programming session, they have solved the problem of whether I want to work in that position without my having to trouble myself with memorizing problems to answer, nor waste their time screening me.<p>The filter I am applying here is against the out-of-the-book part of this. If a company wanted to provide a previously solved bug in a section of their own code, with enough information to debug but perhaps not enough testing written into the system, to me this would not filter that position out. As long as the job would be similar in setup to the methods used during the interview this would be fine by me. Difficult, as the level of chaos internally to any interviewee is very high, and most positions would not be nearly as chaotic as the induced level this hiring process creates.<p>I think asking on-the-board questions, or running some pair programming, is a filter for perspective, and attempts to identify how an applicant handles chaos.<p>To put it another way, the company wants people who when they hear an alarm will file out of the business in an orderly fashion, doing that job that has out-of-a-book interviews during hiring. I personally walk towards alarms, not away, and am plenty happy not to be stuck in a position that isn't supposed to have someone like me in it.<p>My system is tragically flawed, of course. A company could easily use an interview process they consider arbitrary to filter the lowest tier of applicants (non-tech people fishing for a few months paid internet browsing), and I could, not recognizing the insignificance of it, preselect them false when they would have stopped that interview after ten minutes and hired me on a handshake.