| Sorry, that's not silly at all. You are taking the wrong context and you are fooling yourself thinking it is unimportant to question abililty. Linked list is the simplest data structure one can pick it up in 5 minutes in using languages like Ruby and Python. Do you honestly think any serious entrepreneurs would want a company growing hire someone who can't even tell you the basic of a linked list (can you imagine one cannot even tell you what a linked list is and the time complexity?) You didn't even read my comment at all. A lot of things can be done by integrating with the ecosystem out there; but many of the libraries out there are horribly written and there are things you just can't build out of these libraries you find on PyPI. People who build successful products cannot rely on an ecosystem forever. There are crucial components must be built by engineers using data structures and algorithms we know from textbook and then write custom algorithms that work for the use case. Too bad. Some people just want to get away with ecosystem all the time; truth is you just cannot. If a candidate never heard of linked list, wtf does that say about this candidate? Why would I want to hire him if he didn't even attempt to study a few one? I don't expect anyone to write a damn red-black tree algorithm; I can't and I doubt few people is capable of writing that algorithm from scratch (or even remember half of the properties). |