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by AnimalMuppet 1617 days ago
The material is irrelevant, at least for most software engineers. (For a FAANG, not so much. But for most places? Irrelevant.)

I understand the time-space tradeoffs of the various STL collections, and the Java collections. In 35 years, that's been all I have needed. (And, if it does come up, why spend months memorizing what I can spend minutes googleing?) I am not a huge outlier.

Interview for what you need. Anything else is wasteful. Do your people spend most of their time trying to squeeze the absolute most efficiency out of their data structures and algorithms? If so, yes, interview for that. If not, though, then don't interview for that.

Leetcode interviews when that doesn't match the work are just abuse. "Here, take months of your spare time learning to jump through this hoop that's actually irrelevant to the job." That's abuse. The only way that makes any sense is if you need employees that you can continue to abuse after you hire them. And if so, then I don't want to work for your company.

As I said, FAANGs are an exception. They need people who can go from n (log n)^2 to n log n. It makes a huge difference to them. If that's your company, then I'm not talking about you.

1 comments

You're making it sound like only FAANGs operate on such a scale.
I didn't mean to do so. But I would say that the large majority of software engineers work on stuff that doesn't operate at that scale.

[Edit: Or perhaps I should say that far more companies interview as if they operated at that scale than actually operate there.]