I think that I am ready to be a super interviewer

Oct. 12, 2018

Introduction

It is my 10:00 PM mock interview as an interviewer. I gave the algorithm to the interviewee to work on, the algorithm is called binary tree inserter. I worked on the algorithm last Saturday, I came out the idea but I was not able to implement the idea. I had excuse since I played four hours tennis before the contest, I was too exhausted and I did not eat an orange, I had some headache when I worked on the contest.

Today I came cross the interviewee and observed the first eight minutes her performance. And she told me that she likes to try to use level order traversal, using kind of math to figure out how to do insertion, or using a Queue to implement the idea. She wrote the code and asked a few questions, I definitely could tell that she was very competitive and very good at communication.

The most important words I heard from the interviewee was the following:
I have two ideas to solve problems. Let me go over two of them.

Good programmer

How can I tell that the programmer is a top talent programmer? I can tell from what she said, how she approached the problem? And how she handled the problem solving in general. Of course, I also can tell from the code she wrote.