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I dislike traditional phone screens enough that I hone unusual solutions for them. And when they get evil enough, I put them in a public repository.

Here's my FizzBuzz:

https://github.com/ubernostrum/interviewer-hell/blob/master/...

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How is that not iterating (admittedly within the stdlib methods)? They are not literally for loops, but the same concept of iteration.

That's awesome! I'd probably follow up that, since I generally interview for real time, firmware jobs, we try to clearly bound execution time, and therefore frown against more functional techniques like that. But you clearly know how to program well and would most likely get a thumbs up. : )

Admittedly most of my phone-screen solutions aren't tuned for performance; they're tuned to make people scratch their heads.

My code for "detect if a number is a perfect square", though, is O(sqrt(n)) time and O(1) space and uses no floating point operations. Which isn't quite Newton's method, but also saves me having to memorize an implementation of Newton's method and appropriately causes confusion. Here it is in Python, with obfuscation help from itertools:

https://github.com/ubernostrum/interviewer-hell/blob/master/...

And slightly less obfuscated C:

https://github.com/ubernostrum/interviewer-hell/blob/master/...

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