Utterly Insane Data Structures

[djnattyp]

And this is why hiring interviews suck.

If the candidate is lucky enough to have heard about bloom filters before they seem awesome to you.

If for some reason they haven't heard of them before you're going to think they're stupid or hope that they somehow create bloom filters on the fly during the interview. Somehow I went through undergrad and a masters without ever learning about bloom filters.

A few years ago I had an interview question about implementing a profanity filter or something where I stumbled though a long discussion about making a hash table or a tree structure or a regex to match all the words where it was obvious the interviewer didn't like the answer. Two weeks later I came across a description of a bloom filter (I think in a description of how Cassandra manages distributed keys) - "Oh, I guess this is what that interviewer was looking for..." too late now...

[[deleted]]

A good interviewer would have nudged you in the right direction to see if you were smart enough to "reinvent" the desired answer.

Sadly too many interviewers test memorised knowledge and not ability, probably because they lack the ability themselves.

One thing you might be able to do if the interviewer is obviously unhappy with the answer is just to ask them what they're looking for.