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Comment by dclowd9901 | Hacker News Reader

Let me posit a couple things to my fellow interviewing engineers here:

1) I like to ask questions during interviews. I hate the whole "I'm a brilliant guy charade." I'm not. You're not. Einstein was. Deal with it.

2) And I especially don't have a care for rote memorization bullshit for things I can look up in less time than it would take me to remember. I'm a thinker, not a fucking textbook.

So, if you said to me "do whatever using x algorithm", and I said to you, "I don't know x algorithm by heart; could you tell me what it is, and I'll implement it in one of the languages I'm proficient in?" would that just completely turn you off to me as a candidate?

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I tend to say, and this has not worked well for me, "Uh, I would google it, and see what other people have done, and learn from their experiences, and either use their license appropriate code, and or their knowledge and experience and consider that and how it would fit into our architecture and start from there".

Because that's how I engineer. I try to stand on the shoulders of others. And Google provides such an excellent step-stool.

But as I've said, that doesn't seem to go over well.

Implement your favorite sort algorithm? I don't know that algorithm, I tend to use the sort algorithm that comes along with the libraries of the language I am using on the assumption that a) it's good enough until proven otherwise, b) it's well implemented and mostly bug free by the language designers, and c) schedule is paramount, the most bummed out, tweaked out, sort is not.

Yeah, but this differs in what I'm talking about, in that I am going to prove to you that I'm good at doing the most important part of the task: implementing an idea into code.

I think, regardless of memorizing a specific algorithm, if I can prove that I can understand something after only knowing about it for a few seconds, and then actually create a mechanism that works with that understanding, that's really what an interviewer would want to see.

I thought that by telling them I would use google to learn what other people have already learned about the task, I WAS proving to them I know how to implement their ideas into code.

I am more worried about the folks that just jump into a complex project without seeing if someone has already done this beforehand.

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