[blisterpeanuts]

Thank you, yes, that was my point. The interviewer gave me a choice of languages, as I recall in fact he said "use a language you're comfortable with" and I thought to myself, what does this prove? I can google the answer and paste it in without him knowing. Whereas, I can explain instantly how I would do it, too fast to have googled it, and he could maybe interactively ask me "what about this condition? how would you check for errors?" etc. The other thing is, he was unwilling to answer any of my questions until we got through this exercise, and I felt he was being rude and somewhat arrogant though I was being quite polite. I'm more than happy to show off my coding skills - I know lots of languages - just wanted to cut to the chase. Maybe I was too impatient. Or, you know, what they say about trusting the first impression is true!

[xdavidliu]

you seem to be protesting too much. I think it's entirely reasonable for a tech company to ask for code, even if you can describe the algorithm in plain english. Surely writing the code is significantly less than the effort you're expending right now to demonstrate to us why they are unreasonable?

[pnw_hazor]

He may not have been able to understand your answer without seeing it in code.