So, I'm ramping up for interviews and watching some prep videos. It's really a bit comical that removing nodes from binary search trees by hand is a valid task in 2023 exactly as it was in 1992 when I first learned data structures. NEVER needed to do that specific thing for work.

@icanzilb really is a shame these kinds of questions are still used. Even if you did use these things every day, there are such better ways to evaluate candidates.

@icanzilb I have done a lot of interview training for these kinds of things, and I would be happy to help if you want!

@icanzilb My favourite is coding to output the Fibonacci sequence 😛 The last time it came up, I refused to do it — well, not in a nasty way but I did tell them that I had never needed to do that ever for work and while I knew of two different ways to do it (vaguely) that I wasn’t going to do it since it made no sense …

They still wanted to hire me 😀

@f why would they ask for it if they didn't needed to hire you 😂 It's ridiculous because I've used extensively data structures because I worked on crazy code but I'm simply not able to jump on a random problem in a web text editor and come up with the code without Xcode and all the usual tooling 🤷🏽‍♂️

@icanzilb @f absolutely agree. Also I “like” the task to convert number in Roman number. Why? Why the hell you need this? All of this tech coding sessions just waste of time.

@NeroWolfe @f well I've spoken about this to many hiring managers and what I heard most often is that it saves them money to incorrectly discard ppl who would be good hires compared to giving a chance to ppl who would be bad hires and they found this kind of interview helps them to optimize for that 🤷🏽‍♂️

@icanzilb @f that’s explains a lot definitely

@f @icanzilb I have a clue here. Currently I’m working on my side project GPT assistant for Sublime Text editor. And after any code change this, the fib seq is the first and the only thing that I’m asking it to print me, to get to know whether I broke smth or not. Soooo, maybe there was some kind of bot/human check?

@icanzilb pretty confident I’d bomb that

@cwagdev me too :)

@cwagdev man, it's such a bummer I can't freelance from here, we could've be building things together 🤕

@icanzilb yeah it is 😞