Nothing but "try applying again in 6-12 months" can fix the "candidate is having a bad day" cause for a false negative, don't know why you're bringing that up.

Nothing but "try applying again in 6-12 months" can fix the "candidate is having a bad day" cause for a false negative, don't know why you're bringing that up. Similarly this thread is about code in the context of interviewing, not production code, so the whole side-argument about when libraries are/aren't appropriate doesn't seem relevant... As a candidate I've been asked things like "write code to reverse this string" and I've given "this_str[::-1] is probably what I'd use on the job. Do you really want me to write a str_reverse() function? Does it need to be in-place?" Each time is yes at least for the first question, so I do it, but I wouldn't expect it to go to production. When I'm on the interviewer side and made to ask questions like string reverse or whatever I say "no, you don't have to do the lower level implementation", all I'm trying to verify is that someone can program, not that they can program arbitrary foo the way I want it done, but typically people start with the low level function, even when I say "use whatever language you want" they still go for Java or similar.