[hamidpalo]

My 2 cents: This is a horrible interview question. It tests arcane knowledge that takes about 15 seconds of googling, kind of like the varchar2 question in this blog post: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html .

It doesn't really tell you if the interviewee can code, and it probably doesn't tell you much about how they think. Developers should be asked to write code and design systems, whether large scale services or libraries.

[troels]

Agreed. I read the article, expecting some sort of twist at the end, but it never came.

[eleven]

A valid point. I should've been more clear that this question really only makes sense when talking to a frontend dev. I always try to avoid the "varchar2" style question, a phone interview shouldn't be a trivia contest. For a frontend dev the sticky footer question can tell you more about a persons coding style and thought process. A proficient frontend dev would have an opinion about how sticky footer should be done and be able to identify common pitfalls.

[lusr]

Assuming I understand it correctly, the paradoxical thing about this article is that it seems to imply the engineers currently working there would have failed this interview question.

[X4]

>> Developers should be asked to write code and design systems, whether large scale services or libraries.

Specify. Blurry comments like this don't make the situation any better, no offense. You know that the solution i's entirely situation agnostic.