So are red-black trees, but almost no one has the rotation/rebalance algos memorized. Hell, even look at binary search: There are so many ways to go wrong. There is a famous blog post from Josh Bloch about it.
What will you say when you fail an interview over an "introductory data structures" problem?
so much this, I applied recently to a tech company which gave me 2 questions to complete within an hour.
I knew the solution to the first was the min-cut algorithm, but no way I could code it straight up and down let alone in ~30min.
Plus these leetcode-esque questions always come with millions of test cases making the need to be 100% exact and double check the constraints.
I even had my data structures/algo book nearby on the shelf that I could've used to cheat this but that would've been a new low for me, especially considering this was for a "mid"-level position working on APIs/JS/SQL.
I can understand if you want me to be an algorithm specialist but for web development for what im assuming would be a run of the mil SaaS application... this is absurd.
Sorry for interview experience. It is definitely a buyer's market in US tech right now, so companies can wait as long as necessary to find their unicorn to write CRUD apps for less than 100K USD!
The real question: If the tables were turned, could the interviewers pass their own tests? Probably not.
What will you say when you fail an interview over an "introductory data structures" problem?
The lack of humility makes me wonder...