[learc83]

A binary heap has some advantages over using a balanced tree that could have significant performance impacts (and vice versa). Particularly in a situation where you need to roll your own priority queue.

That's why I said it's likely the person who built it would done a bit of research. When hiring someone I care that they remember enough to realize that and are capable of doing the research, more than that they remember exactly how to implement some data structure.

>If I could have this conversation that we're having right here, right now with them then they'd probably pass my hiring bar.

I think that's a totally reasonable. My problem is that this isn't what people are complaining about when complaining about white board interviews.

99% of the time the interviewer is asking for the answer to a very specific problem that is highly biased towards new grads who would have just seen it on a test.

And even if they say you don't care about the optimal solution they will always hire the person who gets the optimal solution in 15 minutes b/c they memorized it versus the person takes 30 min to bang out something that kind of works.

Here's my approach:

I ask someone else on my team to come up with an interview problem, so I haven't seen it before hand. Then I work with the candidate on hashing out a solution.