Comment by always_good
8 years ago
> if you build a dependency management tool like brew
> and don't know what a tree is, this is suspicious
They didn't say that they didn't know what a tree is. They said they couldn't invert a binary tree in the interview.
It's a stretch to start suggesting that someone doesn't know their basic data structures because they failed some riddleware on the spot.
You can say that they aren't what google was looking for, but my problem comes when someone tries to dismiss another as a bad developer because of that.
Well, inverting is a trivial operation, pseudo-implementation: swap(left, right); recurse(left); recurse(right);
If one doesn't know what is meant one can talk to the interviewer and get a hint about what is meant. It can be that the interviewer is bad and misleading, but usually they have some specific training, this seems unlikely as the candidate didn't complain about the interviewer but admitted he had no clue.
The follow-up question would probably be the question about the complexity, that is also trivial f you know fundamentals of big O notation, as one has to walk over each node.
It's hard to find a more trivial algorithms question. Algorithms are fundamental knowledge for programmers (other than script kiddies)