Almost never. I've never in my professional career had to invert a binary tree or write a sorting algorithm from scratch or reinvent a queue data structure. I've never had to build a Minesweeper clone or generate a maze. Any time I go into interviews and they ask me to do these kinds of tasks, I mentally roll my eyes and my excitement about the role drops.
I once interviewed at CrunchyRoll a couple of years ago, and every single interviewer asked me to implement some flavor of a tree traversal algorithm. The final guy mixed it up by asking me to solve the Knapsack Problem. At the end of the day, I said to the interviewer, "You must traverse trees a lot, then" and he looked at me like I was crazy and said "No, never."
Being a Netflix for anime company, I'm willing to bet they don't fill boxes/knapsacks with products, either.
Ok, so then WTF am I doing here?
codingdave 1618 days ago [-]
It depends on which part of an interview you are talking about. Big O notation has never been talked about in my daily work, but you absolutely need to make your code perform well when you write it. I've never had to specifically traverse a binary tree, but I absolutely need to be able to process data in a single pass, and I constantly am iterating through something or another.
So if you think you are being tested on being able to recite CS algorithms, the answer is "almost never". But if you think you are being tested on, "Can you solve a problem with code, and make it perform well?", the answer is "Every day."
JohnFen 1619 days ago [-]
Very often, but I think it depends on what you think you've been tested on. Often, the test is somewhat different than it may appear.
For instance, you may be asked to write a short program to solve some example problem. That problem may be entirely unrelated to the sort of work you'll do in the position, but the point of the exercise isn't to find out if you know how to solve that particular problem, it's to get an insight into your approach to problem-solving and development more generally.
downerending 1619 days ago [-]
Not often.
Worse still, the stuff I'm "tested" on in interviews is often unrelated to the job spec.
And of course, the job spec is often not very well aligned with the real job spec (what one actually does every day).
GoForthAssemble 1619 days ago [-]
A bit sideways from topic but; I got grilled by the head of the Euro fighter project (Ford management) on the importance of using arrays for everything. Don't do 'int a;' always create an array. I was dismissed half way through for not agreeing.
JohnFen 1619 days ago [-]
> I was dismissed half way through for not agreeing.
Even if I got an offer out of that interview, I would have turned it down. The head of the project making such a statement (in the absence of a good reason for the stance) is a big red warning flag.
jb775 1619 days ago [-]
What was the argument for always creating an array?
pipingdog 1619 days ago [-]
The point of the question, I imagine (and am giving the interviewer the benefit of the doubt), was to see how the candidate negotiated technical compromises. Merely disagreeing without exploring the reasoning behind it and perhaps finding a different solution together might be a red flag for that environment.
GoForthAssemble 1619 days ago [-]
The guys who were originally going to do the interview were in the room. Squirming. I asked if his background was APL (you know array based stuff) and was told that APL, and I shit you not, 'was not A Programming Language'.
diehunde 1618 days ago [-]
I mean it depends. I was tested for Python and SQL and yeah I use both all the time. Now, the specific Python questions of course not. They were just stupid riddles.
Rendered at 21:24:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I once interviewed at CrunchyRoll a couple of years ago, and every single interviewer asked me to implement some flavor of a tree traversal algorithm. The final guy mixed it up by asking me to solve the Knapsack Problem. At the end of the day, I said to the interviewer, "You must traverse trees a lot, then" and he looked at me like I was crazy and said "No, never."
Being a Netflix for anime company, I'm willing to bet they don't fill boxes/knapsacks with products, either.
Ok, so then WTF am I doing here?
So if you think you are being tested on being able to recite CS algorithms, the answer is "almost never". But if you think you are being tested on, "Can you solve a problem with code, and make it perform well?", the answer is "Every day."
For instance, you may be asked to write a short program to solve some example problem. That problem may be entirely unrelated to the sort of work you'll do in the position, but the point of the exercise isn't to find out if you know how to solve that particular problem, it's to get an insight into your approach to problem-solving and development more generally.
Worse still, the stuff I'm "tested" on in interviews is often unrelated to the job spec.
And of course, the job spec is often not very well aligned with the real job spec (what one actually does every day).
Even if I got an offer out of that interview, I would have turned it down. The head of the project making such a statement (in the absence of a good reason for the stance) is a big red warning flag.