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During my last job hunt I kept getting people doing the "test for palindrome" phone-screen question. After a while I started creatively expressing my dislike o
by ubernostrum 10y ago
During my last job hunt I kept getting people doing the "test for palindrome" phone-screen question.
After a while I started creatively expressing my dislike of phone screens by showing them an implementation that hints at some of the complexity lurking in this allegedly-simple task (i.e., you need to understand Unicode classes and normalization in order to write a palindrome tester).
- devishard 10y agoThat's totally a question I'd ask, and I don't understand why you don't like it. The reason I'd ask it is not because it's a simple task, it's because it's not a simple task: what I'm looking for is that you aren't going to over-confident-ly throw naive solutions at hard problems. That will cause bugs and have to be cleaned up. I think if you showed me an implementation that hinted at some of the complexity lurking in the task, that would be a big point in your favor.
- mark-r 10y agoI think it depends on the interviewer and the purpose of asking the question. For a phone screen I'd expect it to be a variant of FizzBuzz, designed to weed out the people that aren't worth wasting time on. Coming up with a complex solution, when the interviewer was looking for something simple, is probably grounds for a fail - even if the complexity is justified.
- ubernostrum 10y agoYeah, a lot of places use it as an initial phone-screen "can you code" question. I did bust out a version on one call which did detection of combining classes, normalized into composed form before checking the reverse, etc., and the interviewer seemed kinda lost as I explained it. Ended up not working for them, but for different reasons.