As it stands, any of the libraries that do DOM manipulation for me also traverse the tree for me ... so, again, why do I need to implement a toy BFS in an interview?
Also, if you know that all the companies do this, why don’t you just study before hand? Tree traversals come up multiple times in the article. I understand the author’s frustration but not their (early) insistence on not studying for an important interview. When they did study later I wonder how seriously they took it based on the tone.
And what's the likelihood of that happening with a well-used framework? Maybe the interviewer wants to see my ability to debug problems - great let's do that instead. You want to see how I work? OK, let's pair on something. Pinning this to "implement BFS at the drop of a hat on a whiteboard or in this project" is bullshit.
>Also, if you know that all the companies do this, why don’t you just study before hand?
Fine. I'll implement a few solutions to the problem in the languages I'm familiar with and put it on GitHub. Now the interviewer can check it out and we don't have to waste time at a whiteboard.
In my experience, higher than you'd hope.
Just because the interview culture has evolved to this awkward unrepresentative generally unhelpful filtering method, is no justification for "well just do it that way and you'll be fine".
If I'm the new monkey, and someone smacks me for touching the ladder, I'm going to ask why and push back if there's no good answer.
I don’t think it’s about the BFS, it’s about attitude.
The maze solving could be solved by breadth first too. It is algorithm that can be used in many different contexts.