[bolanyo]

Perhaps there is a sort of selection bias going on, where the people who work at Google have been chosen because they are good at leetcode type problems and think they are important, and so they tend to solve problems by implementing their own tries and similar data structures, rather than by using robust canned implementations.

[tgma]

> rather than by using robust canned implementations

And who is supposed to implement the robust canned implementation?

[bolanyo]

Probably not a UWaterloo recent grad who is good at programming competitions and has just been hired onto a random product team at Google.

[tgma]

I’d posit that a UWaterloo grad who landed a job at Google is close to maximally likely to end up working on something like that [acknowledging that in absolute terms relatively few college grads do so.]