According to Manoj's answer to my question here, what do you suggest as a good problem that should stretch the interviewee's (horrible word ;-) programming capabilities and show whether he is a good programmer?
+2
A:
I've just read the Blog Post by Steve Yegge that is linked from this answer in your original Question. There are some coding examples.
boutta
2008-11-20 10:47:52
A:
One traditional thing is to ask them to implement some basic data structure (like linked list).
Touko
2008-11-20 10:48:06
+2
A:
I had to write "Just" a program. I had 1 week, and a language I never used before(WinDev). I blew them away, all I did was a little game of lights-out. But I had to work around different kinds of limitations in the trial version of the software I used. I was the only one that managed to learn a new language and wrote a game in one week.
Sorskoot
2008-11-20 10:49:06
+10
A:
I would ask the candidate to work with me in a pair programming in some real project.
Ricardo Acras
2008-11-20 10:52:39
+1
A:
I can remember a theoretical algorithm problem from a university exam:
You are provided a text file and your task is to print its content (lines) in reversed order. The file is quite long but you are allowed to use only basic file actions (read a line), a limited number of variables (ie., not one for each line), and an action that prints a variable to the screen.
So, what do you think? (I'll post the solution in the comments.)
gius
2008-11-20 10:54:04
Solution: 1.Create the function 2.Read next line from the file into a variable 3.Call the function (recursion) 4.Print the variable
gius
2008-11-20 10:57:24
Using non-tail recursion to overcome memory limitations is like using a semitrailer to knock down a gate with a sign "no cars allowed to pass"
Aur Saraf
2008-11-20 11:33:14
It was not a real-life problem. It was more an algorithm problem.
gius
2008-11-20 11:38:09
+1 to semitrailer. Creating a new function call for each line semi-implicitly creates a new variable binding. If anything, it is even worse on memory than just creating a variable for each line.
Svante
2008-11-20 12:41:47
I might add, by the same reasoning you could call an array "just one variable".
Svante
2008-11-20 12:42:51
and you'll blow up the stack on a large file
KevinDTimm
2009-08-18 07:31:37
A:
From Joel's Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing:
For programming questions, I ask candidates to write a small function in C. Here are some typical problems I would ask:
- Reverse a string in place
- Reverse a linked list
- Count all the bits that are on in a byte
- Binary search
- Find the longest run in a string
- atoi
- itoa (great, because they have to use a stack or strrev)
Galwegian
2008-11-20 10:57:33
Iv've asked 1 (array, not string) recently, and a guy with 10 years of experience had problems with it!
quant_dev
2009-06-27 11:49:36
I've got 25 years of C/C++/Java/Python/VB/Perl/shell and can see #1 and #2 being a pain in the ass, just because most frameworks have this ability already so I've expunged the memory locations where these algo's were stored :)
KevinDTimm
2009-08-18 07:33:26
+2
A:
For database programmers, i always give the task of de-duplicating a list (i.e. a table that hasn't got a primary key) and a table that has a primary key. I then ask them to write a select statement that lists the rows that are only in one or other table but not both. I might also ask them to do a pivot rotation or aggregation. Strangely, it is this sort of very simple task that seems to sort out the people who have the skills. It comes through as clear as a bell the moment they get stuck into the task.
Phil Factor
2009-02-06 18:23:20
A:
I was recently asked to manually parse a string as an integer, without using any built-in casting or converting.
George Jempty
2010-10-05 00:15:53