[gnulinux]

After college, I was interviewing with the company I eventually ended up with. This was the second technical interview (and we eventually had a third). The very first question I was asked was to write a function that prints out a triangle like:

.

..

...

....

At the time I thought this was an attack to my honor. I literally felt terrible, and thought the interviewer was mocking me, for some reason. I also thought maybe I couldn't make my resume clear. Anyway, this was only a few moments, since questions gradually became harder. Needless to say, after this interview I was really curious why would they ask me such a simple question, which is nothing more than 2 lines of python code.

But then I started learning about this mythical men, who have good resumes but can't even write for loops. I guess I was naive and assumed everyone with a degree in CS would be competent.

[huherto]

I believe I pretty much came out with this interview question. When I was 16 I learned programming from a BASIC book and there was a set of exercises like that. Years later (~ 1994?) when I first started hiring software engineers I noticed that many didn't even know how to do for loops. So I remembered these and started using them for the initial screening. Over the years I have worked with many people and I know many of them adopted these.

[dte22]

no offset for the triangle, not too bad