Don't get me wrong. I don't like the way interviews are conducted much. Especially the "trying to trip up" part, and the focus on absolutely artificial problems.
But:
> Lol: "Hashes, sets, heaps, binary trees, linked lists, all the usual suspects." Yeah, I spend most of my time fiddling with binary trees and hashes at the office, said no one ever.
Actually, I spent a lot of time with stuff like that. And I'm certainly not alone. And a lot of the problems I deal with is where people haven't thought about algorithmic problems (complexity, constant factors like latency, cache efficiency, ...).
Now you can certainly argue that that's not the case for most SV jobs. And that you can re-train a lot of that on the job. And I'd agree to a good degree. But I think ridiculing the importance of such topics just mirrors the mistake the of the interviewing side.
But:
> Lol: "Hashes, sets, heaps, binary trees, linked lists, all the usual suspects." Yeah, I spend most of my time fiddling with binary trees and hashes at the office, said no one ever.
Actually, I spent a lot of time with stuff like that. And I'm certainly not alone. And a lot of the problems I deal with is where people haven't thought about algorithmic problems (complexity, constant factors like latency, cache efficiency, ...).
Now you can certainly argue that that's not the case for most SV jobs. And that you can re-train a lot of that on the job. And I'd agree to a good degree. But I think ridiculing the importance of such topics just mirrors the mistake the of the interviewing side.