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[Ex-Googler here] Truth be told this is a trivial question to be asked during an algo interview and as an interviewer I'd consider this a...

[Ex-Googler here] Truth be told this is a trivial question to be asked during an algo interview and as an interviewer I'd consider this a warm-up. Otherwise it's a rather poor question since either you know how to do it (ie, you have an idea about recursion) or you don't - there aren't too many shades of grey or possible follow-up questions that I can ask to probe the depth of your knowledge. That being said if I asked this as a warm-up and we'd spend the whole interview trying to get that done then of course my verdict would be No Hire. As an interviewer it is not my job to look at your GitHub profile - instead I am assigned an area to check and I try to come up with the best understanding of the candidate in that area . While failing to reverse a binary tree is a total failure in algo/ds you can still be hired since there are several interviewers (if you make it to onsites, that is), each probing a different area. My biggest problem with Google style interview process is that it's easily passed by folks who already passed it in a different company. After having interviewed hundreds of Google's candidates I moved to another big company with the same interview type and the experience was really surreal. On my algo/ds interview I got asked slight variations of the same questions I was asking myself - and over time I've seen some totally brilliant, unexpected solutions. Must have been a strange experience for the interviewer who got his questions each answered in 3 minutes tops. I also made it a sport to solve each one in a different language because why not. Not sure though about validity of the signal the company got from this interview.

Posted by fishnchips on Jun 10, 2015, 10:28 PM

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[Ex-Googler here] Truth be told this is a trivial question to be asked during an algo interview and as an interviewer I'd consider this a...

fishnchipsJun 10, 2015, 10:28 PM

[Ex-Googler here] Truth be told this is a trivial question to be asked during an algo interview and as an interviewer I'd consider this a warm-up. Otherwise it's a rather poor question since either you know how to do it (ie, you have an idea about recursion) or you don't - there aren't too many shades of grey or possible follow-up questions that I can ask to probe the depth of your knowledge. That being said if I asked this as a warm-up and we'd spend the whole interview trying to get that done then of course my verdict would be No Hire. As an interviewer it is not my job to look at your GitHub profile - instead I am assigned an area to check and I try to come up with the best understanding of the candidate in that area . While failing to reverse a binary tree is a total failure in algo/ds you can still be hired since there are several interviewers (if you make it to onsites, that is), each probing a different area. My biggest problem with Google style interview process is that it's easily passed by folks who already passed it in a different company. After having interviewed hundreds of Google's candidates I moved to another big company with the same interview type and the experience was really surreal. On my algo/ds interview I got asked slight variations of the same questions I was asking myself - and over time I've seen some totally brilliant, unexpected solutions. Must have been a strange experience for the interviewer who got his questions each answered in 3 minutes tops. I also made it a sport to solve each one in a different language because why not. Not sure though about validity of the signal the company got from this interview.

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