I've interviewed a lot of people, and I've asked LL questions, besides other algorithmic questions, and mostly I ask these questions to new grads with no much experience.
The reason is, if you don't have much work experience, what else would I ask you, it's something that you've been learning about recently in your CS degree, and I want to see if you can apply what you learned.
If you have work experience that is relevant, or don't have a CS degree, I'll ask something else.
For me I feel that a lot of people don't understand that an interview is a conversation, feel free to think out loud, ask questions, and ask for help. I want to see your thinking process, I don't really care about the actual solution.
Thanks. Unfortunately this is not the case always. I explicitly start interviews telling I'm not academically trained in CS even though I've been practically coding for decades, and I tell them if they ask some "in paper" CS question, I might not answer well. People still ask me to do merge sort - which frankly isn't even in theory that hard - but I think I've subconsciously refused to learn a sorting algorithm just so I can answer a stupid interview question (the day I need to optimize a sorting problem myself I'll learn it hopefully). Whenever the person still insists on asking this without any help, he also comes off as a douche who can only see in black and white.
Should I suck it up and learn these things to do better in interviews? Maybe. But thankfully this handicap became a nice filter and I'm in a nice job where people value real experience and "getting things done" more than linked lists and merge sort, so won't need to worry about dealing with these folk for a long time hopefully.
This is why I'm not going to apply for Google any time soon. Their entire hiring process seems to revolve around how much CS trivia you memorised at school.
Merge sort is incredibly practical though, any time you have to sort a data set that doesn't all fit in memory at once. I've used it a couple of times. As you say, it's not that hard.
This has been my approach as well. I always make sure to talk about the experience with projects new grads may have encountered during their CS degree, but it’s hard to have an in-depth talk about your experience if you don’t have much.
Being on the interviewer side of the table more than the interviewee side, I like to think that almost all complaints about the terrible way "the industry" interviews are still valid, but that for the people I've interviewed, even if they share many of the complaints, I like to think most of them also think "well except with that guy, that wasn't so bad." Even though I've always been frustrated about not being able to really try the interview styles I want to try and have to somewhat conform to a terrible mold.
I may be kidding myself but I do think having an interviewer who gives a damn and recognizes "the industry" standard sucks is key. I disagree with you in that I do actually care about (aspects of) the solution, but that's not all I care about. Interviewers disagree with each other all the time on better ways to interview, but there's a whole class of interviewers who just don't care and will perform whatever HR or their manager or some other interviewer tells them to do. I think these also get the most complaints from interviewees. The possible exception is if you actually have a robust work-sample test with objective metrics.
Whatever the case interviewers should strive to make sure interviewees understand the parameters of the interview rather than hope the interviewees can read minds. Not all interviewers believe "it's a conversation" and some will penalize you if you ask questions, some will penalize you if you don't ask questions... As an interviewee it's an adversarial experience and without any indication from the interviewer to set expectations to the contrary it's no wonder interviewees will be guarded or choke or whatever else.
I don't like to give straight-up algorithm problems like "implement this data structure and one or two common client use cases for testing". But interviewees should prepare for it, even if they're not fresh grads, because "the industry" sucks at interviewing. What if you're forced to give an algorithm-type problem by someone higher up? I think interviewers who give a damn even a little can make this significantly better than the default archetype characterized by complaints.
For the interview I got hired from most recently I had the fortune of having interviewers who weren't robotic, they said "use any language you like, can you implement a stack?" and I typed "In python, stack = []". They had me elaborate a little, then we talked a bit about Python, I mentioned it can also be a queue if they wanted as the built-in array is quite flexible, then they had me do some other stuff. Having brainfarted "implement a stack with plain native arrays holding ints in Java (and the clever implementation of a stack with memory by self-referencing an object of itself)" in a prior interview I'm aware that even basic stuff can end up taking many minutes of time, I'm sure my interviewers thought that most candidates would take a certain number of minutes for the stack question, but they were dynamic and could ask other things rather than waste both our time. Meanwhile another interviewer I worked with did an interview where he gave someone a "standard" "reverse this string" problem and the person responded in Python with something like "str[::-1]" or similarly concise, but coworker made them do it again in the "standard" way. No, instead that should have been an indication to move on to a more interesting problem.
If I were made to give a linked list problem and someone responded with a good old (cons) from 1959 we'd be done. I wouldn't make them (defstruct) and (defun) their poor equivalent but instead move on to a more interesting algorithm problem that can use linked lists as a building block, e.g. something involving a BFS or DFS (and even though I like iterative versions of such they might very well hit me with a recursive solution, and that'd be fine). Back to the twitter thread I don't think the reason the linked list has endured has anything to do with lower power computers back in the day, since it was a common abstraction on much weaker hardware and came built-in with a variety of popular languages long predating C and long after C.
Yeah, it might just be best to use a script to run `git clone --depth=1` into a temporary directory and run the Git GUI on that checkout. I think I'll try writing that up.
Not exctly accurate, for the part of the number that is < 100, it will always be R-L, as in 25, would be 5 and twenty in Arabic.
Also for the part that is L-R, that is not the rule, as some people still read all the number as R-L (actually in a lot of historical documents that was the case), so the would read 1925 as five and twenty and nine hundred and a thousand. Where is now most people would read it as a thousand, and nine hundred, and five and twenty.
Yes sorry for too-late-to-edit confusing typo: german Hindi French are all L-R , all big-endian (least significant digit on right) all have numbers which, when spoken, aren’t said in strict digit order.
Could you explain why is that the case, I've heard that multiple times, but for me the math doesn't work out.
If I earn an amount of (x+y), I would get taxed on (x+y), but if I donate x money, I would get taxed on y, but I've already paid x in donations, so unless there is something fishy going on with the x donations part, it would make sense for someone to not donate, as they are already being taxed on y, and the taxes on x would be less than x.
So how are the rich making these donations out of my wallet?
A lot of times, the donations are something they would already be doing. For example, instead of throwing away a couch, which someone was planning on doing, they could donate it to Good Will and get a write-off for the amount the couch was worth (typically they get to fill that in). This also works for much larger things like buildings or land. So if someone owned a parcel of land that they paid $100K for, used for a long time, but then the neighborhood was blighted or something, they could then donate it. It might be worth $30K on the market, but they could say it was $100K and write off the entire amount, which would earn them $36K vs. the $30K plus sales costs to sell it outright.
There are guidelines from the IRS, but they are easy to manipulate:
Arm's-length offer. An arm's-length offer to buy the property close to the valuation date may help to prove its value if the person making the offer was willing and able to complete the transaction. To rely on an offer, you should be able to show proof of the offer and the specific amount to be paid. Offers to buy property other than the donated item will help to determine value if the other property is reasonably similar to the donated property.
So that person could get a few friends or associates to make offers on the property for $100K and that would generally be enough to prove value at $100K using the arm's-length valuation method.
Also, another example that Trump did was make donations to an organization that held meetings in his hotel. Using your example, Trump made x+y, then donated x to a charity that then spent x on Trump's hotel, so trump is paying taxes on y even though he earned x+y (it works out a little differently, but that's the gist).
For me it's not even a conscious effort, as it feels rude to be on your phone, when you are having a meal with someone. Is it not rude to start reading a book while you are having a lunch with someone, why is the phone any different.
When there is a need to look at your phone (Important message, a call, or even to look up something), I think the polite thing is to excuse yourself, do the thing really quickly, and get back to your meal.
I'm sorry, I'm not a native English speaker, and sometimes I fall into these mistakes.
I think what threw you off is my incorrect punctuation, as I should've wrote it as
> Is it not rude to start reading a book while you are having a lunch with someone? Why is the phone any different?
You're right ! I kept reading it inverting the two first words. I even double-checked when posting because that seemed illogical. Funny how I somehow needed someone to point it out to be able to read it right.
It happened to me in French a couple of months ago. I read the sentence 5 to 6 times to be sure, I even quoted it in my reply, to express how illogical the proposition was.
And then the guy replied that I misunderstood. I was like: " impossible, I double-triple-quadruple-checked and quoted the relevant part". And then, blast! I saw that I got lost in the position of the negative part (it wasn't even a very complex case where negations are chained, as it happens sometimes). Worst thing is that the way I understood it, it didn't have much grammatical sense, whereas the real sentence was correct.
And the fact that I had quoted the sentence proved that he hadn't edited in between. Else I would certainly have blamed him for that: I was so sure of my cautious multiple checks...
I was ashamed of myself.
(I had troubles with "is it"/"it is" in the present case too, I had to re-read the sentence 3 times to be sure. What confuses me in English is not really the grammar, it is the abundance of very short words, they scramble the structure of the sentence, for they are less recognizable and distinguishable from each other.)
It's possible, but it's far, far less likely than a post on social media with your name tied to it - it's also completely deniable and contains only usernames.
This crosses the Internet boundary too - see e.g. the well-known case of a guy who lost his job because someone overheard his meatspace conversation and decided to post it on-line...
And if you don't have minimum wage/hiring/firing laws, that would help with the illegal immigrants problem, as there would be no incentive to hire an illegal immigrant (it's only the headache of in case you are caught).
If you have work experience that is relevant, or don't have a CS degree, I'll ask something else.
For me I feel that a lot of people don't understand that an interview is a conversation, feel free to think out loud, ask questions, and ask for help. I want to see your thinking process, I don't really care about the actual solution.