questions for programmers interview
category: code [glöplog]
TLM: yeah, but you we're doing it for the hell of it, the applicants have to do it under pressure. not so much fun :p
Quote:
it all depends on who you wanna hire - someone who gives you shit if you're wrong on someone who shuts up and does whatever you say.
Well, "wrong" is a hard thing to define in the context of a job interview.
Fundamentally, you have to accept that the questions you get in a job interview are contrived, artificial substitutes for real-world problems. This is not a bad thing. (I've read the horror stories on TheDailyWTF about recruiters who posed real-world "how would you implement X" problems in interviews as a blatant way to get free consultancy. Don't do that.)
In turn, this means that these interview questions have to exist within a sort of un-reality bubble where it's assumed that the interviewer IS right: "I know this is a contrived problem, and so do you. But supposing you were faced with this scenario, how would you deal with it?" Stepping out of the bubble and saying "that's a crap question and I refuse to answer it" doesn't help anyone. (And if that *is* what the interviewer is looking for, and the whole thing is a trick question, then they're being morally dishonest.)
To take the factorial question as an example: the interviewer wants you to demonstrate that you understand how recursion works. They're not looking for you to say "actually recursion is a really sucky way of calculating factorials", even if that is undeniably true. Likewise, the Brainfuck question is there to test your attitude to performing unglamorous tasks, not your ability to observe that a real-world project involving Brainfuck would be really quite fucked-up.
