[dwc]

> Having said that, I lament the issues that the OP brought up: poor naming, unfamiliarity with their language's data structures, etc. Those are issues that will come up. Especially naming.

Indeed. And those things came up in writing a fairly simple utility function, so they're going to come up later in some large codebase.

While you're seldom hiring programmers to write utility functions like this, this kind of test shows whether the candidates have a basic familiarity with topics that will definitely come into play in their day-to-day work. I regularly run into "professionals" who can't structure their code in sensible ways, who don't even try to name things well, don't think about edge cases, etc. As it turns out, you don't want these people gluing together library calls either, because you'll end up with a mess on your hands.