I propose, as well, that we “weed them out” with a week of hunger games, battle bots, and rocket launch tests.
In seriousness, through a decade of experience in AI, I have found that most “famous” and “exotic” algorithms that software engineers love testing (e.g. OP’s references to sorting, tree searching, and recursion) come up exactly never in my day-to-day.
Please, limit testing to the actual data structures and algorithms that dominate 99% of the proposed work. If the proposed work is not in a field you are truly an expert at, then don’t be responsible for technically interviewing this person.
In my branch of AI, if I’m not getting solely evaluated on my ability to work with tensors, vectors, graphs, …, then I realize there is no AI group at this company (or it is inferior in its autonomy). There are so many extremely useful specializations in real-world moonshots, that would otherwise get bludgeoned upon any interview within a general purpose software engineering culture.
In seriousness, through a decade of experience in AI, I have found that most “famous” and “exotic” algorithms that software engineers love testing (e.g. OP’s references to sorting, tree searching, and recursion) come up exactly never in my day-to-day.
Please, limit testing to the actual data structures and algorithms that dominate 99% of the proposed work. If the proposed work is not in a field you are truly an expert at, then don’t be responsible for technically interviewing this person.
In my branch of AI, if I’m not getting solely evaluated on my ability to work with tensors, vectors, graphs, …, then I realize there is no AI group at this company (or it is inferior in its autonomy). There are so many extremely useful specializations in real-world moonshots, that would otherwise get bludgeoned upon any interview within a general purpose software engineering culture.