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0 pointsactivitypea3y ago0 comments

The disdain is fueled by companies' behavior. Your approach makes sense, but if that were the case, then a DSA whiteboard interview should be a fail/pass -- a company shouldn't prefer a candidate that managed to cook up an O(n log n) solution over a candidate that only got a solution in O(n2). In my experience, no company doing whiteboard interviews works like that. As OP themselves said in another comment, "it's not a binary yes/no, but gives a range to score the candidate"

At the end of the day, you can't test for negatives and just pick a random person that doesn't fail anything. You need to have a defined set of values to look for in a candidate, and to design an interview that tests for those values. That's why I hate DSAs -- for most (all?) companies, they're treated as dogma rather than a pragmatic solution to a difficult problem.

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vkou3y ago

I don't ask just one question in a DSA interview.

I ask multiple related questions, and if a candidate struggles with one of them, I probe for strengths in other areas.

No one answer to a question in that interview is a pass or fail. But the interview, holistically, is a pass or fail, or a conditional[1] pass.

[1] I was impresssed by some aspects of the candidate, but there are notable, significant weaknesses. Please determine if other interviewers have detected similar weaknesses, or if the candidate just got unlucky with my particular question.

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