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I've been forced to implement atoi and itoa functions in interviews, and albeit I agree with you that it's silly, I think they are just looking for a positive a

I've been forced to implement atoi and itoa functions in interviews, and albeit I agree with you that it's silly, I think they are just looking for a positive attitude. I try to hype myself up with a "thank you sir may I have another" once I get through solving what I think is a silly question. I remember being asked to solve a linked list problem with callbacks in JS where a service returned a Node and the API call to the next node in a list. I had to just build a function to traverse the async list - I'd have wanted to just redesign that API, but instead I had to solve their silly problem. I got the job, and it was all due to forcing myself to have a positive attitude and being happy to solve the problems vs questioning why one would ask it.

NetOpWibby 9y ago
That...sounds absolutely dreadful. I'm happy for you but that doesn't sound like my cup of tea.
- neosavvy 9y ago
  I think it just happens when younger folks do the interviewing, they don't know how to interview so they grasp for what they know. Just seems that every big firm does it. Recently I had a take-home assignment - spend like a week at night working on it only to be kind of insulted by the folks who interviewed me. They didn't even spend 5 whole minutes looking over my work. I was far more frustrated with that than I was being asked to implement a Linked List in front of someone on the spot.