AgentIcarus

Out of interest, why is being on Verizon a selling point?

Was there something special about OS/2 that suggested it would be the winner of this war or did WP and Lotus just make the same bad bet at the same time?

Do you think they would be if they charged?

I'm not seeing a smoking gun here and the thread looks very reasonable. I see nothing related to "growth" so maybe link to something that actually backs up your assertion?

I'm not a huge fan of this question. I've been programming for 20 years (professionally for 13). Is the hardest problem some noddy maths i worked out at 15 to convert real coordinates to screen coordinates? Is it the first app i wrote out of college when i learned that servlets aren't thread safe? Is it what i worked on last year to design my current company's authentication/authorization system?

I find it very hard to interpolate between these examples. And none of them are "hard"! I haven't written an OS or a more efficient linked list. All I've done is plugged away at something until it works.

You're being downvoted because you're wrong on a "Europe" level.

I think patatino's point was that his boss would say "You're not working" not "You're not taking time off to be sick"

That's a really good point, thanks taeric.

Anything less than O(n) obviously means not needing to look at every element of the input, i.e. it's already sorted or similar. For most other interview problems that seems like a reasonable lower bound in the absence of more detailed analysis. I guess the recruiter's advice to go practice on TopCoder wasn't just copy-paste.

So. Having just messed up an interview at a large tech company by having trouble deriving an O(n) solution on the whiteboard, anyone got any good tips on how to take algorithms / data structures to the next level and look good at this sort of thing?

I think this is actually the original definition of honey trap.

I always thought the point was that he spots a ... tattoo? Of a snake? That reminds him of the club? Or the dancer... I'm going to have to watch it again aren't I?

This seems similar to michaelochurch's thinking about 'guilds' - which I guess is a precursor to formalised 'engineers' or master craftsmen, which is something Software 'Engineering' seems to be in dire need of.