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Comment by 1_800_UNICORN | Hacker News Reader

Any company with an interview process where the key to passing the interview is "Pay more attention in your Algorithms and Data Structures classes", is a company that I'm never taking a job at.

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Why would I want to hire a candidate that paid thousands of dollars for Algorithms and Data Structures classes but didn't feel the need to pay attention? Don't you think that says something about the candidate?

I've been out of college for 10 years, writing software professionally... it's so rare to have to calculate the big-O of an algorithm, or use a data structure much fancier than an array or a hash table, or implement my own search algorithm. And if I had to do any of those things, I would look it up and leverage this collaborative thing we've created called the internet.

So why should I be expected to regurgitate trivia at a whiteboard to get your job?

It's weird to me seeing statements like this because I don't work on any esoteric or fancy code, just frontend UIs, but I'm frequently making data structure and algorithm decisions.

Then ask questions about the UI framework the developer has experience in and ask about real problems faced with that framework for a complex UI.

If I'm understanding 1_800_UNICORN's point correctly, it's more along the lines of 'any company that expects an experienced developer to recite academic details on algorithms'. Certainly my current knowledge of algorithms is very practical and I'm certain I've forgotten much of the academic stuff I learned 20 years ago. You remember that which is useful, forget that which is not (situational, of course) and when a company is looking for the latter, they're unrealistic or they want an academic programmer, which I'm not.

An essential element to the code that I write on a daily basis is a strong understanding of data structures and algorithms. Why not test this understanding?

But do you still do it using the book methods taught in college? If the interviewer is okay talking about the concepts instead of the lingo, that seems okay. But don't expect people to remember textbook details for years.

As an aside, I've done many, many interviews, and for a long time my manager insisted on jumping in and asking candidates to recite the components of SOLID and explain them. You can probably guess that very few (none that I can recall) got it on the first attempt. Good candidates could talk about the concepts if you reminded them what the acronym stands for. To me this means the question is useless. Ask about the concepts and skip the trivia.

I don't expect them to remember textbook details either. But I expect people to know how to manipulate and understand an unfamiliar data structure or understand when a given data structure is appropriate for a particular problem domain. I expect people to understand (or be able to derive) when memoization is appropriate. I expect people to understand (or be able to derive) how using different data structures or representations of these data structures might affect memory layout and cache performance.

That's essential stuff, not something to be dismissed as "textbook details".

Sure, but my experience searching for jobs indicates that those forms of questions are very rarely asked. Instead, questions like "in a N dimensional space filled with M points, find the point(s) closest to a given point" or "figure out if this list of pointers has a loop", or "implement quicksort in Java".

If you don't use these as your whiteboard questions, great. But I've not run into you or others like you in my own searching.

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