story
Also, the question is, is the ability to write a BFS on a whiteboard a useful way to screen programming candidates for most positions. No it is not.
Next to arrays and lists, trees are such fundamental part of computer programming that I can't find an excuse for not being aware of some basic operations. I am not suggesting here that the RB or AVL trees and all the tricky stuff about them should be your bed time reading, but a certain baseline should be established.
Could I have dug up a library to do what I needed, sure I guess. Easier to take 20 minutes and just write the tool.
What? That would be a huge red flag in my book. Where are your unit tests? I'm not trusting your 20 minute off the cuff reproduction of classic algorithms in any business critical piece of the code, not ever.
This would get you booted from a lot of places, or at least given a stern talking to for doing something that seems slick, cool, and time-saving in the short term (yay, let's roll our own!) when really it's immature and time-wasting in the long run.
Never (!) homebrew that shit unless you have to (like, you're in an embedded environment or your use case requires some bleeding edge research algorithm).
It's like seeing someone write their own argument-parsing code. Holy shit, what a bad idea. Never (!) do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadth-first_search
Correct arg parsing is actually significantly more complicated in comparison because of all the possibilities and edge cases.
> Never (!) homebrew that shit unless you have to (like, you're in an embedded environment or your use case requires some bleeding edge research algorithm).
I can't help but think this mentality is what lead to the recent left-pad debacle
So we did that. works well. I dunno, maybe this company is just full of incompetents. I mean, I doubt it, but it is possible.
I appreciate judgement without context as well. Really, it's awesome.
