GreenNight

About the "Bocadillo de Jamón" (cured ham sandwich page 18):

It's only 2 ingredients, so you still have leeway to add some more, and so you have to add tomatoes (and a bit of olive oil and salt) to make the typical catalan "pa amb tomaquet" (pan with tomatoes).

1/2 1/3 Baguette 2-4 slices jamón 1-2 ripe tomatoes (red and juicy) 1-2 teaspoon olive oil 1 pinch of salt

Open baguette. Cut the tomatoes in half and spread their innards on the bread. Oil and salt it. Layer with jamón, close up and enjoy even more than the original recipe.

"Pa amb tomaquet" looks like this: http://jaumepros.blogspot.com/2007/11/pa-amb-tomquet.html

You can do it with any kind of bread, but with toasted bread it's even better.

>But of course, the point of an interview is to identify the good, not the bad, so harder problems would do just fine as well in ruling out the bad.

Yes, and no. Hard problems, being hard, mean that you don't expect all the good programmers to pass them, but to see how they think around them. And some people are able to talk the talk without walking the walk.

It's better to have an easy problem and a hard one. The easy one weeds awfully bad people, the hard one helps you find the good among the rest.