> If you “get stuck”, what are you going to do when you bump up against your limitations at work?
If I got stuck on finding whether a linked list had a cycle in it, I would Google for "how to determine whether a linked list has a cycle in it". Ironically, that's the one thing I'm not allowed to do in a coding interview.
In fact, trying to invent something from first principles as you're theoretically supposed to do in an interview would be a waste of my employer's time.
What do you do when Google doesn’t have a good answer?
The point is I can easily fill an hour applying different debugging and learning techniques that have a chance at getting me unstuck. That’s one of the things that makes me a good programmer.
What are you going to do when the solution to your problem is not on Google/Stack Overflow? Give up? If you're only going to code things that have already been coded, and can be accessed merely by Googling, then what's the point of your job?
If I got stuck on finding whether a linked list had a cycle in it, I would Google for "how to determine whether a linked list has a cycle in it". Ironically, that's the one thing I'm not allowed to do in a coding interview.
In fact, trying to invent something from first principles as you're theoretically supposed to do in an interview would be a waste of my employer's time.