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I don't get the obsession with binary trees questions on interviews. I've had several in a couple different interviews. You know how many times I've coded a binary tree algorithmn, in 15 years as a professional programmer? Zeeeeero. They just aren't that common in actual code.

Why not ask questions about, say, working with a general tree data structure, like XML or an HTML DOM? That's something that comes up all the time in many fields. Why the obsession with low-level pointer juggling?



http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing... There were earlier versions of that article as well. Joel kinda popularized the notion of those kind of problems




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