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Comment by clintonc | Hacker News Reader

It's not about making an uncomfortable environment; it's a recognition that a program is 90% written before you should ever fire up your editor.

What is meant by "full potential" here? You are not expected to write a hundred lines of code, or get something working end-to-end. The goal is to see if you can see to the core of something more complex than a for loop. If you can, you ought to be able to explain that to a colleague in a person-to-person manner, including some syntactically-passable code. Believe it or not, a whiteboard is pretty much to most efficient way to do that.

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Actually my first question as an interviewer was always a for loop. Generally reversing a string in place. For some people it took the whole 45 minutes of the interview to get it done. They felt accomplished at the end. I had to wait through it with straight face...I couldn't tell them that it was only a warm-up question, because I was not allowed to say anything that might hurt their feelings. My task was to gather data about the person.

Maybe they think "it can't be so simple question, it's GOOGLE, maybe they ask for the most fast and efficient algorithm of existing..."

You can ask how efficient it needs to be. The interview is always a 2-way conversation. For example you can tell that you can check whether the string size is divisible by 4/8 and use built-in CPU instructions that convert between big-endian and little-endian ordering. Still, generally what's more important for me to see that the person who is interviewed checks all the edge cases (sees the difference between odd and even length strings, and makes sure that trivial cases, like 0 or 1 byte/character long string work as well)

I would be wary about that too, but I would rather answer with the first algorithm that comes to my mind, without worrying about efficiency yet, and if the interviewer ask me for something more efficient, well, then I would start digging.

You understand that those kinds of questions are so well known? If someone provides you solution immediately then he/she probably learned it before, as the other 100 typical questions. So you basically testing memory instead of programming/algorithmic skills.

Also I think that you asking for working code, not a general description of the algorithm, right?

This person never said that passing this first question was in any way a positive indicator of skill, though. For better or worse, when you have a lot of people coming in, sometimes you need to throw a negative filter in front. Something which you can say "If they can't do this, our conversation is over, and I can stop wasting time right away."

As much as I've been frustrated by someone asking me to write FizzBuzz, I greatly sympathize with the people who end up asking it or some variant of a very, very simple coding problem. I hope that at some point, there really will be a better way.

Couldn't such a simple question be asked on a phone screen ?

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