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Comment by quanto | Hacker News Reader

That particular question was not supposed to be a trick question. If the answer given in, say, Python was 'max(array),' I would have found the answer acceptable ('max' is an intrinsic function in Python); a better answer would be writing a for-loop. The person facing this question was an applied CS PhD (student at the time) at a Top-3 in Europe with prior working experience (IIRC).

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That sounds an awful lot like panic not incompetence.

I appreciate the sympathy, but, in this particular case, the question was part of homework, not on-the-spot pop whiteboarding. To this day, I find this curious. I asked folks at other firms, too, and apparently, this kind of phenomenon is common. Hence, all the damning statistics about the FizzBuzz.

Proctored homework? If not, I don't understand how he couldn't come up with a solution at all.

You can speculate but anyway there are all kinds of reasons a person can fail to do something that they are in fact capable of doing.

Sometimes people who have DECADES of walking experience just... fall.

My story: Years ago I went across country (ok it's UK!) for a position with an education startup. It was an all-day-er. The morning went well I aced the in person stuff, we gelled. Then I started to realise why I was there. Was I risking my marriage by taking a cross country position? Is the CEO just a bit too full of himself? What don't I trust about the product manager?

At the end is a hands on leet-code test. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was about. I do remember writing a function to replace 'abs', and realising that my brain was not even in the same county.

Yeah. People fail for all sorts of reasons. But when it's odd, maybe it is them. But beware. Maybe it's you.

I am glad I flunked hard in Bristol. I think I would have hated it. But then if I was a rubbish coder I would say that too.

I didn't realise what it was like to panic in an interview until it happened to me - couldn't write code to detect whether two rectangles were overlapping even though I had been doing graphics programming for 10+ years at that point.

It was a CTO role and I'd just aced a presentation on "How to launch a new product" and I could not context switch to coding mode fast enough.

It happened to me once too, when I was still wet behind the ears, my mind went totally blank, could barely remember my own name. It didn’t help when one of the two men interviewing me said “look, we don’t want bullshitters here”.

I wonder if I’m one of the anecdotes about people in tech who can’t do the basics. That would at least amuse me somewhat.

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