[olnluis]

Long reply but last October I had pretty enjoyable interview experience during a front-end screening at Google, for which I absolutely grinded LeetCode.

To my surprise, it was an actual front-end task. I told him jokingly "What, no leetcode?" to which he laughed saying "I have my ways". To my even bigger surprise, it was also a DSA question in disguise.

After writing a component to render out a filesystem tree view, the interviewer asked me which algorithm I was applying for this task. I never really think of algorithms when doing front-end, only in terms of design patterns, but the answer was immediately clear that I was using DFS. Sadly I didn't get a follow-up, I thought I just didn't pass. Then a few days after one of their massive layoff rounds, got an e-mail saying I did great but weren't hiring anymore, lol.

But I liked this approach so much that I've used variations of this question when interviewing candidates at my job. The task itself is incredibly simple, but a surprisingly amount of people can't solve it or complicate it unnecessarily without or before asking for clarification. I also tell them it's not necessary to write executable code. This somehow confuses people a lot? I've found a lot of candidates not comfortable writing code without an IDE, even with an "open-book" and when told it doesn't have to run.