| That's not how interviews work. You are not alone in the room being judged by an all-seeing eye. You are talking to a human, and each of you is evaluating whether you want to work with the other. As an interviewer, I'm always happy to talk to the candidate about the question I ask. I'm perfectly happy to answer "What is a breadth-first search? Why does it solve this problem?". I'm perfectly happy to talk about algorithms with them, and ask leading questions if the candidate explains where they're having difficulty. As a candidate, I'm not interested in working with an interviewer who doesn't approach the interview the same way. Remember, all interviews are bidirectional. This person's stated reaction to the question was anger that it was asked. Most likely masked in person, but even masked tells us a lot. It tells us he didn't actually talk to the interviewer. If he had talked to the interviewer and got garbage back, he would have been angry about how awful the people were, not that some technical question was asked. If he'd talked to the interviewer and got useful information back, he wouldn't have thought it was a bad question. The only options left are trying to stumble through it silently and getting it wrong, or sullenly saying "I don't know" and moving on. And that's the problem. A good programmer isn't measured by being able to make things. A good programmer is measured by being able to work with others and make a positive contribution in a group. Everything this person is describing is how to make a bad first impression during an interview. Maybe he's a great programmer, but he's utterly failing to actually convey that in the important aspects during the interview. I wouldn't hire him, and this writeup is exactly why. He needs to demonstrate that he's someone people want to work with. This article does the opposite. |
This is something I feel a lot of interviewees aren't aware of, you DON'T have to know EVERYTHING.
I didn't know what a BFS was (I am primarily a front end web developer), so in an interview, I'd simply ask "Could you explain what that is? I'm sure I can find some way to do it."
As an instance, I looked up "Breadth First Search" on google just now, and saw that its just a way to search a tree one generation/level at a time. Once I knew that, the naive approach is simple (I'm sure there is a better way). Start a queue with node(0,0), and loop until the end of the queue, if you don't find the correct value, add the node's children to the queue, and keep going.
I totally feel for the guy, I've been rejected more times than hired, that's for damn sure, and each time is a HUGE blow to the ego, but you have to pick yourself up. I feel he is a great contract developer (not a dig, I am also a contract developer), but not necessarily someone I would hire full time.