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How we measure time complexity

After watching some of these episodes, you might be thinking “This automated testing technology is a really amazing way to check if a candidate’s code works, but how can we tell if the code is actually efficient?”

Great question! While some other platforms may provide some kind of “big O” complexity calculator, we’ve found these kinds of technologies to be excessively resource-intensive and rarely accurate. We would never want to mislead or deceive our dear users, so we use a different, more subtle strategy.

One of the more nuanced strengths of the platform is that each language has a built-in execution time limit, carefully tuned to maintain balance between languages. And this makes it possible to include tests which are specifically designed to time out for solutions that don’t meet the complexity requirement. This way, the candidate can have a comfortable experience where they only need to focus on passing the tests.