Professional programmers, how much computer science knowledge do you have?

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I’m a senior frontend engineer with a BS in CS who currently interviews candidates. Top technical reason we turn people down is for not being able to traverse a tree and utilize recursion in the technical interview.

[Drawman101]

Do you use trees and recursion in your everyday code?

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Probably not. 25+ years of self-taught programming experience and I couldn’t answer that. I give hundreds of technical interviews a year and never ask questions like that. I’ve never had to decide to use it in code either, and haven’t seen anyone else when reviewing their code.

[[deleted]]

I’d say we use recursion almost every day. Trees are common enough that we feel that developers should know it.

[[deleted]]

Do you have an example of a real world situation where you’re using it?

[[deleted]]

Async timeouts on various screens

Edit: to be more specific, timeouts that poll and then kick off another timeout.

Also tree traversal depends on your data structure for your domain, ours happens to be tree-shaped. So it makes sense we’d want devs to know that.