Let’s say that you need to interview a candidate for a Java developer position and address his technical skills (as a developer).
The candidate is given a simple programming task – let’s say that there is an array of 1M integers from the range [0..100000] and the question what algorithm would you use for sorting it with the minimal complexity?
The simplest answer would be to use Arrays.sort(). Some would say it can be done with quick-sort with logarithmic complexity.
But perhaps some of the candidates would be able to identify algorithms with better big-O complexity – assuming the specific conditions for the input.