> Programmers tend to... Please don't generalize about people this way. It's not useful, and it's almost certainly a bad idea to hand-wave away not being able

> Programmers tend to... Please don't generalize about people this way. It's not useful, and it's almost certainly a bad idea to hand-wave away not being able to think through something trivial with an audience. If someone asks you to identify whether a bird in a photo is having a good day or a bad day, then it's reasonable for you to say "Wait, what?" Because that's a research problem that covers a whole host of different subjects (bird psychology, for one) and doesn't have a solution. If someone asks you to implement efficient image segmentation, something that you probably don't know how to do unless you have a PhD in computer vision, then it's reasonable for you to say "I don't know how to do that but I can go home and research how to do it". But OP wasn't asked to solve a hard problem. OP was asked to solve an incredibly simple problem and got angry about it. > It's like interviewing a novelist by asking them to extemporize a speech for you. OPs given scenario is more like interviewing a novelist by asking them to put a handful of words in an order that constructs a grammatically sound sentence. If you can't do that, then they don't want your novel.