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by DannyBee
4877 days ago
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Err, plenty of answers would get you the job besides sorting, including order insensitive hash functions and tables, neat automata based solutions, etc. FWIW: I've hired people who even never got an "optimal" answer, but had brilliant ways of thinking about it that didn't turn out to be better/faster. In any case, they deliberately ask questions that require applying knowledge, and designing an algorithm, rather than memorizing the way to reverse a circular linked list or whatever. So they are questions designed to test whether you can solve problems you haven't seen before by applying basic computer science knowledge. I get/can afford to spend 45 minutes with a candidate. If you've got a better way to understand whether a candidate can apply computer science knowledge, I'd love to hear it. Most problems being worked on for real would take at least 20-30 minutes to introduce (probably a lot longer to explain constraints, etc)
Nobody is going to have interesting insights in fifteen minutes, and engineers are too busy to spend hours per candidate. If you can't see how the anagrams question tests basic data structure and algorithms knowledge, I don't know what to tell you. |
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I actually gave hashing/hash-table of a small character-bag of my own making as the first answer. The interviewer then told me to solve the problem "without any [standard-library] data-structures". I had to question that, and was told I had to come up with everything myself, as if writing my own standard library in C. The interviewer was then satisfied when I gave the sorting answer, and I did get the positive call-back.
It was a matter of giving him what he wanted, not necessarily just solving the problem.