Algorithmic Interview Criticism

how many of the questions asked in the interview actually apply to their jobs? if you know of an example where it's really helpful to write a sorting algorithm correctly in 15 minutes, could you share it? :D

If an interviewer is just testing your memory of an algorithm, it's a bad interview.

Where have you interviewed that hasn't asked you to implement X algorithm by memory?!? I'd love to interview there!

Google doesn't ask questions like these. In fact, they train interviewers to _not_ ask questions like these.

The best, most fair interviews I've been through follow this pattern. I remember one of them told me about a current problem they had, and told me "You can google anything you want, you have 30 minutes. After that, you should tell me how would you solve this problem, including any tradeoffs you've made".This is by far the most realistic scenario employees of most companies face. It doesn't matter so much that one doesn't remember the specific details of tree trav

This question is asked over an interview (I’ve personally faced this question) and the company isn’t deriving any more value out of asking this question as opposed to a Leetcode-style question, so I disagree.

I think it depends on the interviewer intentions. If the intention is to judge whether the candidate knows such and such algorithm (aka they have used or read about it) then it is obviously stupid. On the other hand it could be about how you approach the problem, how you start with a simplest possible solution and then engage in a thought process (along with conversation about what you are thinking) to improve the solution. In this case the final solution doesn't matter, what matters is you

if you're gonna take that route, the appropriate response is:"Will this be relevant to my daily responsibilities and, if so, in what exact context?"or"How many times per week is this algorithm re-implemented by your engineers to solve real problems?"it may in fact be relevant, and then you better know it. but for 99.5% of dev positions, it's just a BS test. knowing the Big-O, cpu/mem trade-offs and applicable datasets for common algorithms is usuall

The symbol of the thing is not the thing: people (should) care about the thing. You don't need a degree to get your head around algorithms. If you can write a simple binary search, for example (arguably the most fundamental algorithm), that's a plus. Therefore a good interviewer will get you to write binary search (the thing) on a whiteboard without saying "binary search" (the symbol of the thing) and see if you can reason your way through it. They will be much more interested in your thought pr

Unless the role you're being interviewed for is "Algorithm Designer", this is a really stupid interview question.