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I Don't Want to Hire You If You Can't Reverse a Binary Tree

thecodebarbarian.com

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Re: I Don't Want to Hire You If You Can't Reverse a Binary Tree

#3
This submission is surprisingly not satire, and misses the points of the arguments around whiteboard coding. (the added interview stress and the limited real-world applications of the code in day-to-day work)

It is not an accurate measure of candidate technical skill, hence the rise of take-home tests. (the submission reminds me of the blog post "I Won't Hire You If You Can't Pass These Programming Questions Because Otherwise You Suck" that was written awhile ago but I can no longer find. That post backfired hilariously because author provided the wrong solution for one of the questions.)

Re: I Don't Want to Hire You If You Can't Reverse a Binary Tree

#5
Sigh. If you hire using know it or not questions about binary trees, then you finally get to hire people who can study up and answer that specific question in a manner Pavlov would approve of.

That does not mean the candidate will be able to design clean APIs, know how best work with different types of data, or even how to troubleshoot existing code.

Still, pat yourself on the back, I mean, your entire team can answer a specific trick interview question, and that's all that matters, right? Right?

Sigh.

Re: I Don't Want to Hire You If You Can't Reverse a Binary Tree

#9

Couldn't disagree more with the author. How many developers need to implement their own binary-tree? This is why code-bases become convoluted with six different implementations of standard data structures.

Even if a developer did need to implement a binary tree, she wouldn't be doing it in a high-pressure, interview setting, nor would she be doing it using a marker on a white board.

Furthermore, the business value of a programmer is rarely how she writes code in isolation. It's how she writes code on a team. I'd take a B-level programmer who is excellent at writing clean, readable, simple code over someone who is a savant at white-board problems.

Re: I Don't Want to Hire You If You Can't Reverse a Binary Tree

#10
Bad article IMO and no idea how it's front page. Yes a database may rely on b trees under the hood, but thankfully someone else has implemented that complexity so my web developer can concentrate on higher level interactions with it.

His herpes analogy is ridiculous. And I've used brew since getting a Mac and no I'm not suffering now.

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