Google Employee audibly laughed at me during a silent moment where I was thinking, during an interview 2 days ago. I was 5 minutes into solving a test given to me that only told me to merge 3 Linked Lists into one sorted one. The requirements only mentioned it generically and it did not mention they were pre-sorted at all so I had no idea what these inputs were lifecycle-wise [not mentioned in requirements]. I block allocated the 3 separate lists as if they were different pooled users, I then copied the elements into a new merged list in a sorting loop which was block allocated with the size of all 3. I kept the data integral because I was not aware of their use, the spec said nothing of that so I would assume they are used if they're just given to a function. Sure thats not what you do for speed, but you default to protecting data when not known.
For instance, I would not want any user of the first list to see more [or less] items, and possibly originating from a different spot or what-have-you. Linked lists are very useful in setting but for many reasons you don't want to use them over array.
The laughter was at about 5 minutes in.. I was just thinking about variable names honestly lol..
>> This test is from 2006 Pragmatic Programmer Podcast on iTunes and I was a listener back then. <<
The tester, the Google Employee must have seen this recommended somewhere, but lost the idea behind it. This is what happens to me during hiring interviews. I just want to say that laughing at someone during an interview is possibly a fireable offense on their part, but all I ever wanted was a fair chance. Fair would be: look at my Github page, look at my code, then interview me. Wow, nobody of the 35 interviewers have done this yet, and that means they have trivially lame implementations of workflow. A hiring manager should look at the profile on a candidate, but I am telling you up and down, left and right I have NOT seen that happen once for me. Is anyone alive in this world?
There was a coding test the day prior which just wanted a simple value count from string to string and to see if they matched and I just used an stl map for that, and I tested it afterwards and it worked. This time I got a 'different guy' along side the first one. Both were Google Employees.