Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful
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Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful
#2Not sure what OP is being proud of exactly. I was subjected to this style when I interviewed at Twitter.
Sorry my op sounded like I was accusing the author of something but this whiteboard approach is what I did at Twitter.
Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful
#3>You are then ushered into a room with the programmer's worst nightmare - a blank whiteboard.
Am I the only one who enjoys programming interviews? Even if you screw it up, it's still fun to try your hand at whatever problem they give you. They also don't expect you to do it perfectly; you're allowed to have sub-superhuman performance.
Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful
#4That was a really entertaining read. I'm not involved in the interviewing process often, but I'd like to be better prepared for the future so that I can ask meaningful questions and not waste anyone's time. I certainly won't be asking anyone to invert a binary tree.
Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful
#5>You are then ushered into a room with the programmer's worst nightmare - a blank whiteboard. Am I the only one who enjoys programming interviews? Even if you screw it up, it's still fun to try your hand at whatever problem they give you. They also don't expect you to do it perfectly; you're allowed to have sub-superhuman performance.
I believe that was the point - are you expected to do perfectly or not. There are different interviewers - some even just want to show off, probably like the strong hashing one.
It's great if you can have a reasonable discussion that actually shows your knowledge.
Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful
#6That was very funny. The failed Ruby interview with the soon to be defunct HN company was hilarious.
It's a good advice to go out to interviews from time to time. Just to see what's out there.
Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful
#7I'm only a rising junior in CS on my second internship and I completely agree. I did really well in my Data Structs & Algorithms class (A+...) and I just hate these types of problems. I bombed Google and Dropbox's interviews, and am ready to never go through another process like that again if I can.
I've been exceedingly lucky landing gigs at great companies that don't filter with these questions. I worked for LeadGenius (YC S11!) and the technical portion of the interview was super fun and effective; I was asked to write a useful piece of software in python which I later applied to school projects! No whiteboarding, no data structures. I'm currently interning at General Motors and their interview was similarly sans whiteboarding, and I'm surrounded by brilliant interns and coworkers. Hmm. At least for me and a few of my peers, being asked to solve the type of problems presented in the article raises some red flags about a company's culture.
Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful
#8While I'm completely, 100%, against these kinds of questions, how else can a company that receives thousands of resumes a day filter out the good from bad?
Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful
#9What does it mean to invert a binary tree?
Re: Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful
#10I just interviewed at a company that asked me to invert a binary tree on a (virtual) whiteboard. In fact, they asked me twice! Once in the initial technical interview, again in the follow-up!
Haven't heard back yet but I'm really disinclined to keep talking to them.