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Comment by indrora | Hacker News Reader

These sorts of screener questions are at the level of "can you write a simple function and can you answer basic questions about it"

A surprising number of candidates I've seen interviewed cannot do the following, my code screener question: "Write a function that, given a set of integers, determines the amplitude (difference between biggest and smallest) of the set."

This is literally max(set) - min(set) in more words. I have seen countless people attempt this in different ways. My favorite was the guy that sorted the list and took the end values.

The worst is when I ask the follow up question: "where might I use this function?" I almost never get the answer of where I stole the function from (matplotlib): "the size of a graph", instead usually getting an "I don't really know".

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> "where might I use this function?"

I'm not so sure about this one. Software development is quite usually "build functionality to serve a given use case" whereas this line of inquiry is more along the lines of "find a use case for the given functionality".

Perhaps if you intend for the conversation to head into a chat about charting and data science?

> Software development is quite usually [not] "find a use case for the given functionality".

If only :)

>These sorts of screener questions are at the level of "can you write a simple function and can you answer basic questions about it"

Some interview questions are like that, but this wasn't one of them. This is not "implement simple functionality" -- for that, you would ask e.g. fizzbuzz or "reverse the elements of a list".

This one requires you to work out something clever that reduces the time needed compared to the brute-force solution. You'll notice that, in this case, even someone at the end of a 4-year computing degree had to think about it for a while to figure out the shortcut.

Yes, once you have the insight that it can be reduced to max(set) - min(set), then it's a matter of writing a simple program. But obviously, this question isn't testing whether you can implement max(set) - min(set) when told to do exactly that. If that's all they were testing, they would have asked him that directly!

It is, rather, to test whether you are generally smart enough to, within the time of the interview, think of such a solution when it wasn't handed to you. To present yourself as having come up with that insight on the spot, when it really took you hours, is a kind of deception.

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