[hitchstory]

It's become almost a cliche as an interview question. That's the main reason I've thought about it enough to be able to critique it.

I think it's not necessarily a bad question assuming that the candidate can recite it. If they can, they probably should have thought about what it means.

I've met plenty of devs who can't recite it but who do it all instinctively though. That's why I'd rather see people demonstrate these principles while coding without using the term at all.

But, coding interviews are expensive and you need some way of sorting the 100 applicants into the 90 who can be ignored and the 10 who are worth an interview. This is a hard problem I've never found a really good answer to. OP's question isn't worse than most of the attempts I've seen.

[gopher_space]

> you need some way of sorting the 100 applicants into the 90 who can be ignored and the 10 who are worth an interview. This is a hard problem I've never found a really good answer to.

It's a solved problem but you need to take your engineers offline during the hiring process. This looks expensive if you're trying to increase headcount rather than fill actual positions.

[jupp0r]

I've also seen plenty of devs who can recite them and then blatantly ignore them when writing code.