[11235813213455]

It evaluates someone's capacity to approach a complex task

It's like in school, you learn many things, not necessarily useful in your daily life, but you learn to learn, and that's what they can see when they confront you with a challenge

Of course, some people who heavily train for this have maybe an advantage, like in school exams.. Personally I never specifically trained for an interview, I just like algorithms, doing some leetcode.com challenges when I've time is a pleasure

[groomed]

The problem is that knowledge needed for exams is needed for exams only, and does not correlate with your overall expertise.

[mav3rick]

I can assure you algos and data structures are a big part of systems software. Without these it's impossible to write efficient and correct code. It is these fundamentals that have made me easily switch profiles from VR to Self Driving to Cloud.

[walterstucco666]

I think it is often much better not to write them yourself, but rely on a battle tested implementation.

Of course we're not talking about left-pad here, but implementing your own Diffie Hellman key exchange from scratch is usually a very bad idea.

[mav3rick]

No one is asking you to write them yourself. But it is important to know when Quicksort becomes quadratic. Or when separate chaining in a hash table can lead to linear look ups. I find it abhorrent that this thread thinks these things are unimportant. Just use a "Library". How about you know your stuff .

[groomed]

> I find it abhorrent that this thread thinks these things are unimportant. Just use a "Library". How about you know your stuff .

How about the fact that "your stuff" is not algorithm. In 99% "your stuff" is to pick the right library

[walterstucco666]

That's very different from "algorithm-heavy interview" process.

You could just ask "do you know when quicksort becomes quadratic?"

> Just use a "Library".

Not just a library, a battle tested one.

A bad implementation of quicksort can be much worse than "accidentally quadratic" bad.

a good library could shuffle the array before sorting it and never be quadratic.

Or has hints about quadratic behaviour in the documentation.

A good library could automatically choose the best sort algorithm for the input.

For example Java used quicksort for primitive types and mergesort for arrays of objects.

now it uses trimsort for both.

But the developer just calls `sort` on the collection.

> How about you know your stuff .

I bet you never encountered quadratic quicksort in your life.

   The probability that quicksort will use a quadratic number of compares when sorting a large array on your computer is much less than the probability that your computer will be struck by lightning! 

How about you know your stuff.

[duiker101]

It might be a complex task, but most often then not I personally think it's the wrong type of complexity.

Most of my day challenges are complex but not in an algorithmic way, they are about structuring code, making components interact etc... the complexity is in keeping a lot of things in mind and create something that is easy to maintain and work on.

[stevefan1999]

oh, fibonacci numbers, why do i take 10 seconds to figure it out