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Comment by mieubrisse | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, why do you consider binary trees, linked lists, and pointer arithmetic to be so out of the bounds of possibility for work at a job? Those strike me as skills I might find invaluable in one of my software engineers depending on the job.

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You probably won't be doing pointer arithmetic in C#. It's been about 5 years since I wrote any C#, but I don't remember any... mostly I remember it as a Java clone, which would preclude pointer arithmetic.

C# has pointers (although you're rarely going to use them)

You're rarely going to use them...so let's ask a candidate about them.

This analogy is proving more accurate as I read thru the comments.

You're right on the rarely using them part, I don't think I used a single one. Thanks for the clarification!

The only time I've ever used them is to speed up drawing. Bitmap.SetPixel is super slow compared to taking a pointer to the raw image data and writing there directly.

Let me offer an explanation: maybe the job he was applying for asked for knowledge and experience in Java, Spring, Hibernate, Grails, Javascript, SQL, CSS, writing stored procs with PL/SQL, performance tuning, node.js, and Git...and the binary trees/linked lists portion only pertains to Java (and maybe Javascript?). More specifically, maybe the guy just hasn't had the need, for whatever reason, to use a binary tree or a linked list recently. I doubt he runs around saying "it's April, I haven't used a TreeMap in a while, let me use one now so it's fresh in my mind for next year's interview".

The point I'm trying to make is that some requirements are very, very wide/broad. And then they'll take one piece of that broad pie and decide to go very, very deep.

And then there's the death knell...you spent time developing deep expertise in something no longer actively used. This applies more to frameworks than languages (i.e. Struts, Prototype, Dojo, etc.)

It's a no-win situation all around.

While I can't speak for the OP, in that situation, I would take this to mean that they aren't sure of the skills they actually need so they're asking general questions that may or may not reveal whether or not we (the company and myself) are a good match.

Granted, if they ask a few of those and then jump right in with more specific questions I would just count that as the qualifier/anti-BS filter.

If I was only given general softball 100 series CS course questions I'd probably end up trying to wrestle more info about the position out of the interviewer unless I was really hard up for a job and was willing to put up with potentially unfulfilling work for a while.

Edit: Grammar

>find invaluable in one of my software engineers -depending on the job-.

I think you kind of answered the question yourself. ;)

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