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Discussion on: What's your favorite interview question?

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speculative profile image
Jeffrey Tao

Yeah, I'm pretty ambivalent about whiteboard interviews myself, since I don't think they accurately express the kinds of skills that most developers need. Data structures & algorithms do come up from time to time on the job, but not as frequently as software engineering skills.

At the same time, at least when I was in university, everyone was preparing for this style of whiteboard interview, so at the very least it'll be what the people I'm interviewing are expecting. The company policy isn't really mine to change :P

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buphmin profile image
buphmin

That is fair. After looking at 11 year old spaghetti php your perspective of what is important as a developer changes from algorithms to maintaining and writing easy to understand and modify code. Though we did get a petabyte data file in recently and parsing and processing that was one spot where complexity actually has an impact.