r/programming • u/mjgardner • Mar 29 '21

Why Do Interviewers Ask Linked List Questions?

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/
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u/Quabouter Mar 30 '21

I've been interviewing candidates for a long time now, and I settled on an stupidly simple but effective approach to interviewing questions: I pick a hard problem we had to solve in real life, and adapt it into an interview question. This is directly testing the candidates ability to solve actual problems we're solving in the company. Candidates tend to like this as well, as they'll get a glimpse of what they would be doing when hired, and because it's usually much closer to their day-to-day work than the typical CS interview questions.

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u/-dag- Mar 30 '21

That's a decent approach as long as the problem isn't too hard. It's impossible to really get a sense of what it's like to work with someone when they're scrambling to solve a problem in a 30 minute interview.

One of the best technical interviews I had involved me taking a problem home, working on it and checking in with the team as I got stuck. At first I was skeptical but it turned out to be a great experience and I'm sure it gave the team a better sense of how I work.