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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

I had a coderpad facebook phone screen last week, interviewer said " that code the won't compile, can you see why?" .. It was missing a semicolon.

on a related note, I write scala on daily basis but scala is not that well suited for coding interviews, I found.

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Facebook likes their interview nonsense, but stores passwords in plaintext. I think the credibility of the system is in question

They didn't store pw in plain text. Pw were accidentally captured in logs and those logs were stored in an internal DB. This happens often.

That's storing passwords in plain text. "Happens often" is no valid excuse, on the contrary. If it happens often you should know about it if you are a qualified engineer.

That's because Scala doesn't have nearly enough semicolons.

Kidding aside, why do you feel Scala is unsuited to coding interviews, assuming the interviewer well-understands the language?

hard to write heap sort in functional style with immutable collections. I guess you could write imperative style code.

Well, ah... unless you're applying at Amalgamated SortCo Industries, asking for on-the-spot sorting implementation is pretty high on the list of absurd interview questions.

Anyway I'd think one might use an array and not some other list/collection.

I used clojure once during an interview and bombed, passed again 2 years later at the same company with Python. Would’ve made a big difference in my equity had I just started then!

Yea functional langs just get in the way during interviews. I can write same imperative code i write in java in scala but it just makes it harder( eg: remember to use var instead of val, mutable collections vs default mutable ect) at which point I am just better off practicing for interviews in java.

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