[tracer4201]

I’m not seeing the connection here between DP problems or pointers indicating great engineers. I’ve worked with people who were great at programming problems but couldn’t actually solve real world problems without step by step guidance, folks who cannot communicate at all with the team or with product people, folks who have a terrible work ethic, etc. The ability to solve DP would be nothing but noise if we were to go back and time and hold these interviews differently... and to be honest, we almost always had at least some recursion or DP problem. All it really did was bias our hiring towards grads fresh from school.

Regarding understanding pointers... you may as well use the candidates understanding of object oriented programming or knowing how to test their code. Pointers seems like an arbitrary litmus test, and it comes off as you feel like understanding pointers make you special when it really doesn’t.