On: Nearly all binary searches and mergesorts are broken (2006)

[fnordpiglet]

This was always my go to interview question when I wanted to smugly prove to someone I’m smarter than them because I knew in fact they were smarter than me and I was feeling insecure. Good to see others use overflow gotchas too.

[0x445442 → fnordpiglet]

My favorite was; write a function that determines the number of games necessary to be played in a single elimination tournament with N participants. It’s interesting to watch how many go off into recursion land when they get into the mind set of solving these Leet Code puzzles.

[fnordpiglet → 0x445442]

My favorite is when interviewers expect you to know sportsball stuff like tournament elimination rules when interviewing programmers who clearly don’t care about sportsball

[0x445442 → fnordpiglet]

Could be chess.

[fnordpiglet → 0x445442]

Real nerds don’t compete, they program

[quag → 0x445442]

N-1 games?

[junon → fnordpiglet]

I hate when interviewers rely on niche recall-only interview questions...

[latency-guy2 → junon]

Eh, I don't think integer overflow is a recall-only type question

This type of issue is pretty common to encounter and I make at least a few fixes a year specifically addressing integer overflow across many companies