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the tea protocol is still predictably a gigantic source of PR spam (www.web3isgoinggreat.com)

submitted 8 months ago by self@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do

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[–] sinedpick@awful.systems 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I mean sure? Swapping the pointers recursively is also fine. It's a question meant to see if the interviewee can talk about data structures or code, not to come up with a perfectly optimal working solution. Having a lengthy discussion about what "inversion" of a binary tree even means would even be totally fine imo.

I've interviewed a fair number of candidates and I ask them a very simple question with a bunch of edge cases and grade them based on how they talk about it, not the final solution.

I get the feeling that Max got frustrated and wasn't able to coherently speak about the problem, or the interviewer was dumb as rocks. I think both are equally likely.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Oh yeah I've had the misfortune of giving hundreds of interviews -- mostly programming interviews, but also talking interviews which I consider vastly superior. As well as being on the receiving end of a few.

I've definitely had people do poorly under pressure before. This can be over-complicating the problem, clamming up (surprisingly common), or simply getting too worked up by the interview setting. I hate that because I often think they could have met my rubric in a more relaxed environment.

I've also been on the receiving end of bad interviewers. Don't get me started on HP asking me to implement offsetof in C++... n.b. implementing offsetof in C++ w/o undefined behavior is impossible it has to be a compiler builtin.