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i interviewed as a front end developer for the yahoo fantasy sports team, the tech interview focused on balancing trees... which IMHO is totally unrelated to front end web dev. you wonder why they lost?

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Haha! I heard this kind of experience from some others who interviewed with various companies too. Always wonder why would anyone do that?

You know how many linked lists I've had to traverse in interviews? Wanna know how many linked lists I've had to traverse in my daily work in the last 5 years?

People do that because they're lazy and/or inexperienced interviewers.

What language/field do you work in? Usually one of a language's native data types will be implemented as a linked list, and/or something in a popular library will. That said nobody should ever need to roll their own functions for operating on linked lists.

These days, mostly Objective-C on iOS and Java on Android. Python, mostly, for scripts and quick-and-dirty. Bash for anything else. So, yeah, I haven't seen a lot of linked lists lately. Back in my Microsoft days working mostly with C? You betcha. But I haven't worked there in quite a while.

Linked lists are slow as shit, most of the time. Even things that looks like they are linked lists, i.e. C#'s List<T>, are really dynamic arrays, akin to std::vector. Cache coherency matters.

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