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I always felt that part of the interview process is the candidate asking clarifying questions as well as making and stating assumptions.

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It is. Or at least it was for some of us. I didn't care if the candidate ever got the right answer. I cared about the thinking, the questions, the strategies, and the conversation.

And if some interpretations lead to trivial solutions, but one leads to a complex problem, it's likely that their intention is the latter. A kind of tacit communication

Actually, it may just as likely be that the interviewer is looking to see if you over complicate things. So _ask_.

I hate that. It turns the problem into one of those lateral thinking puzzles we were told some basic information and then the answer winds up being something totally wildly different. It wasn't being very random in the end not being very productive

Are we describing interviews here, or the process of software engineering in practice? It could be either imo.

Those clarifying questions and some of the thinking through consequences are the only really topical part of SE interviews, the rest is just math you won't use on the job 99.99% of the time anyway.

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