[WalterBright]

Studying algo/data structure questions is not gaming the system. I'd far prefer to hire someone who did this over someone who didn't prepare and just tried to wing it, then complained about how unfair it is to ask such questions.

[f0under]

Why is that? Besides preparing for understanding the role, culture, etc why would you need someone to brush up on their algo knowledge for your job interview? Do you believe that algo prep would make them better at their job?

[asQuirreL]

Perhaps the willingness to prepare indicates the candidate is motivated and the algorithmic knowledge they gain from it forms a solid basis and language in which it is possible to test their problem solving abilities?

[WalterBright]

Right. I figure also that a candidate who'll do the homework necessary to prepare for the interview rather than winging it will be more likely to do the homework necessary for the real problems he'll face at work.

(I've known many engineers who wing things at work rather than spend the time to research a correct solution, and not just in software.)

[tluyben2]

Hi Walter, nice to see you again; another (similar to last time) interview process, another discussion here :) Not sure which country you are from, assuming US here; seems your experiences, again, vary wildly from what I see here. The refusal to study this useless stuff upfront had absolutely no baring on their 'refusal of whatever' on the workfloor or 'winging things at work'; employees should refuse things that are a waste of time in my company and they should explain why. If they do that with this 'pre-interview studying', I like them more than the ones who cram all to please the interviewer and show their willingness to do whatever they are told. I think that might be Dutch attitude though so not saying right or wrong here. I think, considering your previous responses that you mean it more subtly as well though.

[WalterBright]

> absolutely no baring

That's not been my experience. I've seen a strong correlation.

> show their willingness to do whatever they are told

I don't think it's the same thing. I've told many of the people I've worked for that what they asked me to do was a waste of their resources. One told me "do it 'cuz I'm the boss and I say so" to which I replied "at the salary you're paying me, I feel obliged to tell you that what you're asking will never work". :-)

Nevertheless, if you know upfront that at a job interview you will be asked certain questions, and you choose to go to the job interview, it seems bizarre to not come prepared. Why bother?

[tluyben2]

> That's not been my experience. I've seen a strong correlation.

Like said, might be culture or maybe I have been lucky.

In my country (I haven't lived there for a while so might've changed but I don't think so) and my company we were not so salary obsessed, so 'at the salary you pay me' is a phrase used never in our office of few 100 colleagues. If you make 5 or 9 figures a year; if the boss tells me 'do it cuz i'm the boss' I'm not doing it if it's a stupid idea and I expect that from my colleagues even if I outrank them technically.

So still thinking it's culture as well; here you cannot fire people easily; you have to make a dossier (with obvious mistakes/flaws etc) and go to a judge and then pay them a few months. So there needs to be much more of a trust relation than master/slave relation imho. Note that we only needed that twice when the employees where watching/downloading pr0n all day. One was a junior designer and the other a phone support employee for our cms.

Edit: btw, i'm not saying I like that system per-se; in some countries (like Spain) it goes too far and you won't hire people because you can't fire them, but in NL I had no actively sabotaging people (you can't fire me so I do just enough); quite the opposite, while in Spain I meet too many of them.

[WWLink]

I'm not doing homework if I'm not getting paid overtime. XD

[mavelikara]

> why would you need someone to brush up on their algo knowledge for your job interview? Do you believe that algo prep would make them better at their job?

Ahem, Walter writes programing language compilers for industrial use. I strongly suspect that algo prep will make them better at their job if he was involved in the hiring :-)

[WalterBright]

Actually, if you asked me cold about various algorithms, I'd probably bomb the answer. But that isn't a problem, as when I need to know some detail it's trivial to look it up. But if I'm going on an interview for a job I cared about, and I expected algorithm questions, I'd consider trolling up on that stuff to be required homework.

[dozzie]

That's an approach I don't understand. If you would "bomb the answer", it means you don't understand and don't feel the algorithm behind. Merely "looking up some detail" doesn't help with that.

It's not like one can look some detail up when he doesn't remember the detail was even there. Good software programmer needs a large working set of such details to sensibly function in a professional setting.

[WalterBright]

Being an educated person is not necessarily being a walking encyclopedia of detail. But it is knowing where to find the information needed at the moment. That's why there are reference books for professionals, like the CRC Handbook.

For another example, nobody knows every detail in the C++ Standard. But a professional is expected to know how to look up a detail in the Standard as required. That doesn't mean he doesn't understand the language.

Maybe you never need to look anything up. But I'm not that kind of person, and don't know anyone that is.

[dozzie]

> Maybe you never need to look anything up.

It's not like that. I do need to check various things, and I daily run `man whatever' (I'm a sysadmin in large part). But even though I often don't remember what was the switch for e.g. `grep' or `find' or `awk', I wouldn't "bomb the question" about that. I would just substitute a sensibly sounding switch, explaining that I'm doing so (and why) and what the switch was supposed to do.

The same stands for algorithms, data structures, or program architecture (in other large part I'm a system programmer). I don't remember how AVL trees do inserts and deletes (frankly, I never learned that properly). I don't remember exactly how inserts and deletes work in B-trees. I never implemented my own hash table. But I still wouldn't "bomb the question" about any of those, because I understand how they work, and the details either can be worked out pretty quickly, or most often are not important for a particular question (unless, of course, the question was "how to insert an element into AVL tree"; then I can at least give high-level answer before calling for data structures handbook for lower-level work).

Heck, I don't even remember most of the cryptographic details. Every time I need to explain RSA or ElGamal encryption algorithms or Feistel net, I need to derive the formulas (I typically don't have any reference handy).

[krolley]

Not to mention the grandparent suggested showing them his GitHub profile and committing fixes to their open source repos. Uhh, yeah, I'd hire you too! Are we forgetting that most developers don't have GitHub profiles or aren't able to patch open source projects.