How is this a stupid interview question? There are a lot of positions this would be a great indicator of whether or not the candidate could do the job. If low

How is this a stupid interview question? There are a lot of positions this would be a great indicator of whether or not the candidate could do the job. If low level programming is involved the candidate better be able to handle this. Just cause you don't have to solve this problem every doesn't mean you're not going to need those skills for systems programming, writing drivers, embedded programming, etc.. I suspect this would have an extremely high weed out rate actually. A very large % of so called software engineers would fail this, certainly anyone who did all their learning in a dynamic language with automatic garbage collection and who had not branched out into lower level programming. It's a dumb question if the job position is for a Javascript UI dev of course.. it's not a good question for all positions. I would also say it's a travesty for any school to award anyone a bachelor's degree in computer science to someone who would fail this question. I've interviewed a large # of candidates with master's degrees who would fail this. Thankfully most of those candidates didn't have a bachelors in computer science + a masters in computer science from a highly ranked US institution. Also someone who groks this problem and solves it is way less likely to write memory leaks into code in a garbage collected language.