I hope this article takes off so that my company will have to change its initial code screen. We make no use of xor in our rather large codebase (I’ve checked) yet pin a lot on whether an interviewee is aware of this trivia.
XOR-only questions are poor unless you're interviewing someone for a very specific kind of role.
He never claimed that. It could just be part of the screen
I do agree with the parent above though that this use of xor is trivia, and not a great interview question.
It sounds like some of these questions are bad screeners anyway, but it makes them even worse if half the people going through the process are feigning surprise at the tricky question then quickly developing a “brilliant” solution.