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Discussion on: Big-O Cheat Sheet

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Ben Lovy • Edited

This is a good point, of course rote memorization will not replace actual understanding, and one would hope any decent interviewer would be able to instantly tell the difference. I don't think the point of charts like these is to cheat at interviews.

That said:

I've never had an interview where someone asked me about any of these CS algorithms/data structures.

This likely varies by job domain/region/experience/whatever - I've only had one interview where I wasn't asked some arbitrary academic question about a data structure I'd never need to know in practice. Technical interviews are pretty varied, and usually broken, but this sort of thing has definitely been a theme for me. Usually in the context of a challenge problem, like you said, but I've been asked to cough up and compare and contrast options to fit a problem. A huge theme of my interview experience is "okay, tell me what the Big-O of your current solution is, and then improve it given the data is constrained by whatever". Studying a chart like this helps me, at least, even though I do understand conceptually why the values are what they are.