TechTakes

1489 readers

18 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

the tea protocol is still predictably a gigantic source of PR spam (www.web3isgoinggreat.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I mean sure? Swapping the pointers recursively is also fine. It's a question meant to see if the interviewee can talk about data structures or code, not to come up with a perfectly optimal working solution. Having a lengthy discussion about what "inversion" of a binary tree even means would even be totally fine imo.

I've interviewed a fair number of candidates and I ask them a very simple question with a bunch of edge cases and grade them based on how they talk about it, not the final solution.

I get the feeling that Max got frustrated and wasn't able to coherently speak about the problem, or the interviewer was dumb as rocks. I think both are equally likely.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Oh yeah I've had the misfortune of giving hundreds of interviews -- mostly programming interviews, but also talking interviews which I consider vastly superior. As well as being on the receiving end of a few.

I've definitely had people do poorly under pressure before. This can be over-complicating the problem, clamming up (surprisingly common), or simply getting too worked up by the interview setting. I hate that because I often think they could have met my rubric in a more relaxed environment.

I've also been on the receiving end of bad interviewers. Don't get me started on HP asking me to implement offsetof in C++... n.b. implementing offsetof in C++ w/o undefined behavior is impossible it has to be a compiler builtin.