I may have been a little too harsh. Binary search is close to being a good interview question, especially since the algorithm does, rarely, come up in real code. But I prefer questions that are more like what people will be doing in their day-to-day job, and binary search is just a little too fiddly.
100% this. Maybe not everyone knows the specific function you’re looking for, but for the ones that know standard library APIs really well, that’s your hire.
I wouldn’t say so. In theory you’d expect a FAANG engineer to be able to construct a correctly terminating loop by reasoning about the loop invariant, but in practice every single candidate gets lost in guesswork and messing up the edge cases and termination condition.
