That’s not the point though – it’s about solving a problem – those are just well known problems that have been studied. That’s like saying you don’t need to teach kids how to add because they can have calculators.

That’s not the point though – it’s about solving a problem – those are just well known problems that have been studied. That’s like saying you don’t need to teach kids how to add because they can have calculators.

Yeah, fair point. Just feel like I have a mountain to climb to secure a role that I did without issue in my last firm. Maybe taking redundancy was not the smartest decision I made!

Yeah.. every time I get a stupidly over geeky interview, I just wonder what the place would be like to work in.. can’t be good.

I’d rather someone talked to me and tried to figure out my intellect beyond the nerdy topics I can boss.

Traversing a red black tree is no harder than traversing any binary tree.

Being asked to implement a red black tree on the other hand, without reference, would be a mean thing to ask in an interview. The rules for rebalancing are tedious and I can’t imagine ever wanting to memorise them.

I do think that any programmer should have a good grasp of algorithms and data structures. I do also know that barely any programmers do. The amount of stuff at work implemented with just arrays is astonishing. Every time I look at code I haven’t seen before it makes me a little bit more sad.

I do think that any programmer should have a good grasp of algorithms and data structures. I do also know that barely any programmers do

Can you elaborate as I am struggling to understand why this is the case. For example as a java programmer I would have expected that knowing when to utilise a LinkedList over an ArrayList or why you should have an optimal hashing algo when using hashmap to ensure everything is not in a single bucket … would be more important?

I am not trying to be awkward, but just really trying to put all of this stuff into context for doing your day job.

For example as a java programmer I would have expected that knowing when to utilise a LinkedList over an ArrayList or why you should have an optimal hashing algo when using hashmap to ensure everything is not in a single bucket

I’ve crossed out a bit. It’s irrelevant what language you’re using, but what you’ve just written highlights that you understand the data structures you’re using.

I am struggling to understand why this is the case.

Would you not be pissed off if a colleague had written some code that you have to maintain that use an ArrayList instead of a HashMap?

I doubt the people hiring you really want you to know how you would implement a red black tree. They want you to demonstrate that you know the benefits of storing data in a binary tree, and further they want you to know that binary trees can become unbalanced, worst case resulting in list like performance and self balancing trees resolve these problems, with some small overhead for insertion. If they want you to implement it on paper on the spot then they might be hiring for a long time but I do think a grasp of why these things exist is important.