Here's how their scenario would actually play out: > I took my sunglasses off, looked him dead in the eye, > and said "Why? Why write your own method i

Here's how their scenario would actually play out: > I took my sunglasses off, looked him dead in the eye, > and said "Why? Why write your own method in > a vanilla language? Give me a good reason." Interviewer: "To see how you might approach it." It's a synthetic interview question. Why does it suddenly need to be a production-ready CSV parser? We don't have enough information to say whether these are bad interview questions, and it's really not the point. Maybe the interviewer just wanted to see if you'd use good fd hygiene (`with open('file.txt') as f:`) and that you can stub out some toy parser code and speak of it intelligently. And that you wouldn't throw a fit when asked to write some code that a library like `npm install fizzbuzz` can already solve.