Coding challenges Memes

Ah, the vicious cycle of tech interviews. You spend weeks memorizing quicksort implementations that you'll never use in production, only to get hired and inflict the same algorithmic hazing on the next generation of developers. It's like learning elaborate medieval torture techniques just so you can become the torturer. And we wonder why our codebases are full of npm packages that sort arrays.

The interviewer asks for a simple array sort of just 0s, 1s, and 2s (literally the easiest sorting problem ever), and this poor soul immediately jumps to Bubble Sort—the algorithmic equivalent of using a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame. For the uninitiated, this is a classic interview problem with a O(n) solution—just count occurrences and rebuild the array! But under pressure, our brain defaults to the first sorting algorithm we learned in CS101. The interviewer's face says it all: your grandma with a walker would cross the finish line before your O(n²) bubble sort even gets halfway through. Nothing captures the interview panic spiral quite like forgetting that you're sorting just THREE UNIQUE VALUES while proposing an algorithm from the stone age of computing.