jameslai

Do they just deport tourists? What is the plan here?

Terrible question for an interview, and further highlights how our interviews are broken.

Greedy algorithms tell you nearly nothing about the candidate's ability to code. What are you going to see? A single loop, some comparison and an equality. Nearly every single solution that can be solved with a greedy algorithm is largely a math problem disguised as programming. The entire question hinges on the candidate finding the right comparison to conduct.

The author himself finds that these are largely math problems:

Lots of similar interview questions are this kind of mathematical optimization problem

So we're not optimizing to find good coders, we're optimizing to find mathematicians who have 5 minutes of coding experience.

At the risk of self-promotion, I'm fairly opinionated on this subject. I have a podcast episode where I discuss exactly this problem (including discuss greedy algorithms), and make some suggestions where we could go as an industry to avoid these kind of bad-signal interviews:

https://socialengineering.fm/episodes/the-problem-with-techn...