Hacker News Reader

>> Puzzled as to why it's so important to some companies to grill on this stuff, expecting it to be top-of-mind, even for front end roles.

Either they do consider it important to the role, or they are trying to select for young CS grads, or they just haven't tried to do any better in their hiring process, or they don't know how.

View on HN

Maybe I’m not like the interviewers/companies to which you’re referring, but I ask a DAG topo sort question (dependency resolution/task ordering) not because I expect the candidate to regurgitate the algorithm but because I legitimately want to see how they work through a problem - especially one they may(hopefully) not be familiar with.

Most of the time I don’t care if they get the optimal algorithm, rather the can think through something and know where problems might be.

Might not be how/why the “others” use that question, but its worked well for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com