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The CAPTCHA That Filters 90% of Developers
Interviews Post #2381 · source on Telegram

The CAPTCHA That Filters 90% of Developers

Description

A meme formatted to look like a CAPTCHA challenge. A blue header bar contains the text 'To prove you are human, please' followed by the main instruction in large white font: 'Invert a binary tree'. Below the header is a dark-themed code editor window, showing a JavaScript function signature: 'function invert(tree) { }' with a cursor ready for input. At the bottom right, there's a blue 'SKIP' button. The humor comes from the absurdity of using a classic, and for some, notoriously difficult, computer science algorithm problem as a simple human verification test. The 'invert a binary tree' problem was famously popularized when Max Howell, the author of Homebrew, tweeted that he was rejected by Google for failing to solve it on a whiteboard. This meme satirizes both the difficulty of technical interviews and the very concept of CAPTCHA, as a well-programmed bot could solve this problem instantly, while many human developers might struggle

Categories

Interviews CS Fundamentals DevCommunities Career HR Security

Common Tags

BinaryTrees Algorithm CodingChallenge Interview CAPTCHA DeveloperHumor

Comments

32
Anonymous ★ Top Pick This CAPTCHA doesn't just stop bots; it stops the 90% of engineers who forgot the recursive solution and now have to click the 'SKIP' button of shame
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    This CAPTCHA doesn't just stop bots; it stops the 90% of engineers who forgot the recursive solution and now have to click the 'SKIP' button of shame

  2. Anonymous

    The real Turing test: the bot nails the O(n) recursion instantly, while the senior engineer hesitates - wondering if they should refactor to an iterative stack so DevSecOps won’t flag it for “unbounded call depth in production.”

  3. Anonymous

    After 20 years of shipping production systems, I still can't prove I'm human without implementing a recursive tree algorithm that I'll never use again - meanwhile, the actual bots are probably just calling tree.reverse() and moving on with their SQL injection attempts

  4. Anonymous

    Ah yes, the classic 'prove you're human' test: inverting a binary tree. Because nothing says 'qualified senior engineer' quite like solving a CS101 problem under pressure that you'll never use in production. Meanwhile, the actual humans who've shipped products to millions of users are stuck at the CAPTCHA screen, wondering if they should just click 'SKIP' on their entire career

  5. Anonymous

    CAPTCHA: invert a binary tree. I proved I’m human by opening a change request, asking who owns the root, and proposing a read-side projection instead of mutating prod

  6. Anonymous

    Proof of humanity is now O(n): implement the left/right swap with O(h) recursion - or hit SKIP like a senior who remembers V8 never shipped real tail-call optimization

  7. Anonymous

    Bots ace image CAPTCHAs; this one filters for engineers scarred by recursive left-right swaps in prod trees

  8. @slnt_opp 5y

    return “eert yranib”

  9. @dmytro_sukhariev 5y

    ща бы бинарными деревьями на джаваскрипте баловаться)0

    1. @asm3r 5y

      why not

    2. @bit69tream 5y

      щас бы джаваскриптом баловаться

      1. @dmytro_sukhariev 5y

        согласен, зашквар тот еще.

  10. @AndrewEastwood 5y

    AI’d do it better than a human

  11. @AndrewEastwood 5y

    ... but this is true

  12. @AndrewEastwood 5y

    lol

  13. Deleted Account 5y

    unlimited power

    1. Deleted Account 5y

      POWER! UNLIMITED POWER!

  14. @bit69tream 5y

    curl stackoverflow.com > unlited_power.c gcc unlited_power.c -o unlited_power ./unlited_power

    1. Deleted Account 5y

      King, you forgot runtime libraries, optimization flags, and -Wall + -Wextra

      1. @alexolexo 5y

        >2020 >caring about warnings Get a load of this guy

        1. Deleted Account 5y

          Lmao

      2. Deleted Account 5y

        all extra shadow non-virtual-dtor old-style-cast cast-align unused overloaded-virtual pedantic conversion sign-conversion misleading-indentation null-dereference double-promotion format=2

        1. @Johnnys_Rampage_s 5y

          Error: flag not found

          1. Deleted Account 5y

            deep

            1. @Johnnys_Rampage_s 5y

              Error: command cannot be executed

              1. Deleted Account 5y

                sudo dd -if=/dev/zero -of=/dev/sda -bs=1M

              2. Deleted Account 5y

                hey, u alive?

                1. @Johnnys_Rampage_s 5y

                  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xee

                  1. Deleted Account 5y

                    sudo rm -rf /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/*

                    1. @Johnnys_Rampage_s 5y

                      OK 👌

                    2. @Johnnys_Rampage_s 5y

                      % sudo fwupdate -a 34578c72-11dc-4378-bc7f-b643866f598c .cache/fwupdmgr/e69073e5403ee433ddfdd40b53781e91074b07b2-firmware_XPS_9560_1_5_0.wu.cab -v Could not set up firmware update: No such file or directory error trace: efivarfs.c:230 efivarfs_get_variable(): open(/sys/firmware/efi/efivars/fwupdate-34578c72-11dc-4378-bc7f-b643866f598c-0-0abba7dc-e516-4167-bbf5-4d9d1c739416): No such file or directory lib.c:152 efi_get_variable(): ops->get_variable failed: No such file or directory efivarfs.c:230 efivarfs_get_variable(): open(/sys/firmware/efi/efivars/fwupdate-34578c72-11dc-4378-bc7f-b643866f598c-0-0abba7dc-e516-4167-bbf5-4d9d1c739416): No such file or directory lib.c:152 efi_get_variable(): ops->get_variable failed: No such file or directory libfwup.c:1207 get_fd_and_media_path(): mkostemps(/boot/efi/EFI//boot/efi/EFI/arch/fw/fw/fwupdate-9FJxpS.cap) failed: No such file or directory

                2. @Johnnys_Rampage_s 5y

                  Error command

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