What's your favorite interview questions related to graphs?
Ask HN: What's your favorite graph interview question?
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite graph interview question?
#2None. Asking about algorithms isn't a good way to assess candidates (unless they will be writing graph algorithms, which as it turns out doesn't happen very often).
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite graph interview question?
#3If you were a graph, which would you be?
More seriously: do people think that any questions that require anything more than DFS, BFS, and/or Dijkstra are reasonable to ask for most general software engineering positions? (I appreciate specific positions might expect more)
Of course, trees are graphs too, and there are loads of tree questions --- I guess I'd narrow my response down to questions regarding general graphs and not just trees.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite graph interview question?
#4Paint fill is a great basic one.
A slight step up from that could be word search/boggle as it involves multiple data structures (trie, etc).
Another good one is topologically sporting a dependency graph to get a list of dependencies to install/operate on in order.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite graph interview question?
#5If you were a graph, which would you be? More seriously: do people think that any questions that require anything more than DFS, BFS, and/or Dijkstra are reasonable to ask for most general software engineering positions? (I appreciate specific positions might expect more) Of course, trees are graphs too, and there are loads of tree questions --- I guess I'd narrow my response down to questions regarding general graph…
I think it's fine to expect engineers to know graph algorithms in terms of what they do and when to use them, but knowing how to implement them on the spot on a whiteboard is stupid. This one company had an interesting problem that I identified quickly as an application of A* with some interesting edge cases on top. Working through those cases and coming up with the heuristic was clearly the main point of the interview, or so I thought. The interviewer asked me to write out A* on the whiteboard...
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite graph interview question?
#6As an interviewer or interviewee?
For a take home interview, variations on 8 queens can be interesting since they utilize dfs and backtracking.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite graph interview question?
#7I also have reservations about algorithms questions as a useful interview filter, but my favourite that I have been asked is "How would you delete a tree using a fixed amount of memory? i.e. no recursion or other dynamic structures".
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite graph interview question?
#8I also have reservations about algorithms questions as a useful interview filter, but my favourite that I have been asked is "How would you delete a tree using a fixed amount of memory? i.e. no recursion or other dynamic structures".
Huh? Deletion has different meanings depending on context. What do you mean by delete, exactly? What language? How is the tree stored?
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite graph interview question?
#9I don't think I've ever encountered one.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite graph interview question?
#10I also have reservations about algorithms questions as a useful interview filter, but my favourite that I have been asked is "How would you delete a tree using a fixed amount of memory? i.e. no recursion or other dynamic structures".
Huh? Deletion has different meanings depending on context. What do you mean by delete, exactly? What language? How is the tree stored?
As far as I've read, sometimes questions are ambiguous to see how the interviewee proceeds with the problem, if they ask relevant questions.