[dllthomas]

"I would ask the candidate a simple sounding question

"You have a file on your computer with 100,000 unsorted numbers, each number on a new line, Sort them and write the output into a new file.

"Many candidates will immediately start writing a program in Java or Python, if they get it right, then they will start optimizing the algorithm, some of them even start talking about big data and how they need Hadoop to solve the problem.

"I am looking for the candidate who can give me this simple command line solution [...]"

I live at the command line. I spent a year at a gig maintaining 90k lines of bash. And yet I think I stand a substantial chance of failing this test.

Not because I am incapable of trivially producing the line in question (even without recourse to the manual). But because interviewers usually aren't looking for "I would run the code someone else wrote to solve your problem". Of course, in practice, reusing code is great - and that should be the answer where it's applicable! But in an interview asking for a solution to a problem where existing code cannot be the bulk of the solution is likely to be too big a question.