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

That's missing the point of the article.

The author says that the candidate's thought process behind arriving at the solution provides insight into the candidate's skill.

There's no reason to implement your own binary tree, but knowing how to devise algorithms to accomplish a given task is a necessary competency.

This misses the point. You showed how easy it is to do this stuff in a real text editor without a time constraint with the luxury of testing and research before you published the post about how easy it is. That's not at all the same as solving an artificial problem on a whiteboard while nervous and in a rush and no ability to test or research

front page because the 'reversing binary trees considered harmful' article got a lot of attention last year

> "Just about everything you do in your programming career will be related to trees."

I've never knowingly used a tree structure since college, everything is abstracted away from me. Now whether this is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen, but it has not been a problem yet.

Terrible way to hire in my opinion.

Personally, I'd rather hire employees who are resourceful, can admit when they don't know something, can follow up with others and conduct proper research to tackle cases where they don't know the solution to a problem, and most of all, are a pleasure to work with and bring good and diligent attitudes about work into the office.

Hiring based on questions like this will get you someone ahead of the curve who perhaps you can trust to execute well immediately but will probably turn out to be a massive pain in the rear in the long run.

I'd rather hire people with good attitudes and willingness to learn and spend the extra time training them and helping them out rather than hire someone because they happened to get in enough rote technical exercises before coming into the interview.