[Avalaxy]

In my (limited) experience bay area startup attach way too much value to bullshit interview tests like these. I'm a proficient developer, I know a lot of practical stuff about programming (setting up a solid architecture, design patterns, scalability, etc.), I have proven many times that I can build, launch and market products from A to Z, but I forgot most of the theoretical stuff I learned back at school, simply because I never have to use it. For example, I failed misserably at writing a recursive function, simply because I never need it and it's usually considered bad practice.

It's nice if you know all the theory, but you really don't need that for 95% of the programming jobs.

I felt really crushed after I failed the test and forgot all that basic knowledge, but in the end it doesn't even matter.

[whichdan]

I would argue that recursion is very important. Could you elaborate on what makes it bad practice? Sure, in languages without tail-call optimization, using it instead of a loop will incur more overhead, but certain problems (like traversing directories in a filesystem, nodes in an XML document, or any tree structure) are impossible to implement otherwise. Do you have a specific scenario in mind where recursion was a poor solution to your problem?