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Comment by cm3 | Hacker News Reader

When presented with a trivial programming task in an interview, I'm partly questioning whether there's something deeper I'm missing or if it's a basic challenge like "did you ever write any code yourself?". That's why some might perceive it as a trick question.

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Yes this happens, some developers overthink things and think meta then meta then meta. This makes it especially tricky to do surveys ("what does the question really mean?") with developers from my experience.

When this happens to me, people in the interview tell me something like "This is easy, are there strings attached I can't see?"

It's because some interviews try to have you solve hard problems, expecting you to have a solution ready in 5 minutes, whereas in the real world you'd consult literature for that.

Whatever happened to, "he seem to be able to code, let's try it for a couple weeks"?

Happened to me twice where everything was fine and then after having been interviewed by 5 or more people, one of them has a bad feeling, and you're not given a chance to prove yourself in a probationary period. Situations like that made me wonder if freelancing is a better path.

In my experience if a tech hiring person is playing with "trick" questions during an interview you should very quickly start wondering if this would be a place you really need to work.

Maybe, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's not up to them what the questions are.

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