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Comment by robterrell | Hacker News Reader

My copy of K&R belonged to my dad and was from the early 80s!

My job interviews in the 80s and 90s (college summer jobs, or the one time a company tried to get me to leave college for a job) had no whiteboard-coding-style technical skills components, aside from demos of software I'd written and general discussions of implementation details.

One job I interviewed for was at Davinci Email. This was probably 1990-ish? They made a LAN email product that ran on top of Novell NetWare. There were a couple of hours of general interviews, including a lunch on-site. The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. He asked me to go through them and tell him what each program would output. I did not get the job.

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Got a job working on an old Ada system during the Great Recession (I was unemployed and desperate enough to take any job). Mom was kind enough to give me all of her old Ada books - apparently her employer (defense contractor) had sent her to training when the language was first introduced.

> The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest.

That's cold. The worst I've had was otherwise normal code with a few deliberate bugs introduced: "Tell me what's wrong with this code."

> The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest.

I had something similar happen in 92. The interview consisted of leaving me alone looking at one screen of Apple BASIC that came from their actual production code. The screen was nearly full of characters. I was supposed to tell them what that bit of code did.

I spent about 5 minutes looking at it, and though I think I could give the correct answer, I also realized I didn't want to work with this code base. I then thanked the interviewer and left.

The headhunter that sent me on this interview was quite irate that I had "embarrassed" them. C'est la vie.

> The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. He asked me to go through them and tell him what each program would output. I did not get the job.

It's nice to know that stupid interview questions are not a modern innovation.

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