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Comment by hashkb | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry... if you can't reverse a linked list, you should be ashamed to call yourself a hacker. Don't get pissed at me, go learn it right now. Know how? Force someone who doesn't to learn.

Edit: I know it's just a recruiting tool masquerading as a position piece.

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I'm not pissed at you, because this isn't important enough to be as salty as you are, but I've been writing code for about 25 years (about 10 professionally) across a wide array of low- and high-level fields. I'm very good at writing code and building systems and I can't reverse a linked list offhand. I understand linked lists and I understand their storage and runtime characteristics, and I could figure reversing the list out given a minute to think, but I'd have to go figure out how to do it on-the-spot because I have never needed to write one from memory in my life at any level. Google exists.

Your post is uncharitable and kind of mean.

I'm sorry, if you think the ability to reverse a linked list has anything but the most shallow and superficial relationship to engineering a product (using software as the tool and medium), you shouldn't call yourself an 'engineer.'

Sure, it's easy to understand what "reverse a linked list" means and entails. That doesn't mean it's a high quality question for a software engineering interview.

There is a big difference between being able to solve a problem during a normal work session, and being able to solve the same problem, on a whiteboard, with no internet access, under time pressure, all while trying to explain your thoughts to an audience.

Whiteboard interviewing is a skill that needs to be practiced, and it is mostly orthogonal to the skill known as "being an engineer".

Yes, pressure will most likely exist on the job... maybe even without internet access... but not on a whiteboard.

> I'm sorry... if you can't reverse a linked list, you should be ashamed to call yourself a hacker. Don't get pissed at me, go learn it right now.

Yeah...I don't understand those kind of complaints. Spend a day or two practicing interview questions and brushing up on algorithms and data structures. The same topics come up in most interviews I've been in. You might not use the information every single day but you'll be better for it.

I wouldn't fail someone in a coding interview for getting that exercise wrong but if they had no idea how a linked list worked and they've never had the curiosity to find out that's really bad. I've interviewed coders who have never even heard of a linked list and you can't tell me that's not some indication of their breadth of knowledge.

You've obviously never been in an interview where you were asked to reverse a linked-list on a whiteboard and the interviewer complained about syntax mistakes on the whiteboard.

Bad interviewers are always going to give bad interviews, whiteboard or not.

I actually have no problems with interviewing using a whiteboard, but asking someone to code on a whiteboard (as I have been asked to do in all but 1 interview that used a whiteboard) seems monumentally stupid.

It's not great but OK for short things. If the interviewer is asking you to write something lengthy and/or getting annoyed about semicolons, brackets and capitalisation though then that's stupid.

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