[alainbryden]

Microsoft recruiters are doing their rounds for Seattle, and I was just asked over the phone how I would implement a quick sort. The answer I wanted to give would have been something like this blog post. As a developer I would never waste valuable time trying to roll my own version of an algorithm that's probably available on Wikipedia and optimized for every programming language imaginable. I guess what they were looking for was some buzz words like "divide and conquer" and "big oh n log n time". I understand interviewing community college graduates with no experience like this, but young adults with 6 years of SE behind them? Ridiculous.

[fencepost]

If I worked at Microsoft?

I'd implement a Quicksort by checking within the existing codebases that I had access to and that were in the same language to see if it had already been done, then patch what I found to match my needs for comparisons, etc.

Note: one big reason for this is licensing - if it was developed in-house, odds are that licensing issues are a non-factor but if it came from "The Internets" then life may get strange. Strange is bad.