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by blindhippo 3464 days ago
That's more advanced then the question I ask typically. Though I might use something like this if I'm interviewing someone with many years of experience (10+).

As I explained above, my question is a warm up - meant to break the ice, calm nerves. But it's surprising to me how effective even a simple list traversal is at identifying weaknesses in a candidates programming ability.
3 comments
Roboprog 3464 days ago
Depending on the platform, there's at least 2 ways to do that :-)

E.g. - "functional" is simply something like:

    subset = filter( predicate, superset )
... but on a "procedural" platform, it's a bit more challenging, starting with how much space to allocate for the result, or whether to mutate the input, and other wading through the swamp.

But, yeah, I can see how it would get people to start up talking somewhere, or else go into "deer in the headlights" mode.

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manishyt 3464 days ago
Just out of curiosity: how would you feel if I answered this question by using existing function [1] in stdlib? Would you consider that as (good) sign of knowing the tools or would you prefer a fresh implementation?

[1] https://docs.python.org/2/library/itertools.html#itertools.c...

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blindhippo 3463 days ago
I see it as a positive if a candidate uses an existing solution to the problem. That's exactly what a good engineer would do in the real world.

But then I take away the library/method and re-state the problem. Because the point is to see if they can understand the problem, and devise a solution.

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manishyt 3462 days ago
Cool. Thanks for your comments.
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jcadam 3464 days ago
Heh, at my previous employer the only coding question we asked during interviews was: "Find the largest element in an array of integers." Some of the ways people found to not solve that simple problem were amazing.

Now, I'm generally against asking hard-core CS questions in a live interview... but a simple bozo filter is probably a good idea.

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blindhippo 3463 days ago
It really does surprise me how a simple programming questions like this does stump the average interviewee. If they need a bit of guidance to get started, I never hold it against the candidate, but if they need a massive hand holding to come to a solution, or if they can't explain how their solution works and how it could be improved, then I know where they stand programming wise.

It is a low bar skills wise, and it tells a lot within a very short amount of time.

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