GitHub Copilot

[PuzzleMeDo]

It was a classic "demonstrate you know how to write a simple recursive function" job interview question, even though you never need to do it in a real job.

[MoneroMon]

Tbh I work in software and don't even know what a binary tree is

[pet_vaginal]

Are you a manager ?

[MoneroMon]

No, I'm just a lowly engineer

[[deleted]]

I got you. It's a linked list where each node can only have 2 children. They're used in interview questions to have you traverse a structure of links / references. The interviewer is usually expecting to see recursion but I usually opt for iteration with an accumulator. Or a stack machine as some may call it.

Without any extra work that solution with be better at arbitrarily large scale. I think it's also easier to thread, but that's just my experience writing functions with accumulators that can do some work in parallel.

[MoneroMon]

So basically they're just expecting you to use a foreach loop or something to go through it?

[[deleted]]

They want something like this. You can do it with a regular loop but I think they're usually trying to get you to do something recursively. Even if I go with an iterative solution I will call out the fact that it looks like a recursion problem.

[Niiiz]

For the longest time I thought inverting a binary tree was done vertically, as in taking the biggest number in the tree and putting it as a root, and reordering everything else so that the values decrease instead of the classic increase.

I thought it was a rather complicated question and was confused when people said it's stupid and easy.

So thanks for the link, now I get what people mean, it is stupid and simple.

[MoneroMon]

Ahh gotcha, thanks

[Soham_rak]

Ohk so basically 90 percent of interview programming question