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Ask HN: What is your go to idiot-filter question in interviews?
What is your go-to question in interviews that you would expect any competent software engineer to be able to answer. Like, for example, the FizzBuzz test. Though yours doesn't necessarily have to be a code challenge.
(edit: fixed fizzbuzz name)
- ColinWright 4y agoAlso know as "FizzBuzz" ... I suggest you do a search for that term: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=fizzbuzz https://hn.algolia.com/?q=fizzbuzz
- amflare 4y agoThats the one, thanks
- farisjarrah 4y agoChatGPT can solve fizzbuzz with no effort at all. Not sure these sorts of "idiot"-filters are as valid anymore
- ColinWright 4y agoSolving FizzBuzz is not the issue, that's just getting the candidate to write a template for the basis of a subsequent discussion on code structure, trade-offs, requirements analysis, and more. Besides, in interview a candidate wouldn't use ChatGPT anyway, so I'm not sure how relevant is your comment.
- t-3 4y agoCan ChatGPT replace you in an interview?
- acapybara 4y agoIt's possible that ChatGPT or a similar language model could be used in an interview, but there are a few reasons why it might not be the best idea. For one, language models like ChatGPT are not able to browse the web or access external information, so they can only provide answers based on the information they have been trained on. This means that they may not be able to provide detailed or up-to-date answers to questions about current events or other topics that require knowledge of information that is not included in their training data. Additionally, language models are not capable of thinking or understanding the world in the same way that humans do, so they may not be able to provide nuanced or complex answers to open-ended questions.
- wruza 4y agoI ask to live-design a quadratic equation solving function (the basic method is provided for those who forgot it) and to discuss decisions done. It tests for edge/degenerate case awareness, numeric issues, experience with multiple results specific to a language, and for choosing a prototype that fits the bigger task. I don’t care if it’s buggy, how much time it takes or whether the first scratch is any good, because it shows fundamental things every decent programmer knows or knows how to discuss and reason about imo. Unlike fizzbuzz, if you pre-solve this question at home and remember these details, you’re already good enough for the next question.
- nailer 4y ago> I ask to live-design a quadratic equation solving function I’ve been programming for a decade, was a Linux/cloud engineer a decade before that, I’ve had code on the front page of google, launched products for Microsoft, and had my code shown on stage at nodeconf and aws re:invent. I am currently top 0.07% on stack overflow. I can answer the other questions in this discussion easily. I would absolutely fail this.
- adamrezich 4y agoeven with the quadratic equation provided?!
- tzarko 4y agoThank you. A lot of the questions in this thread have me seriously doubting myself.
- igorkraw 4y agoSerious question: why? If I understand OP correctly, it's a 1 line math equation which is provided if necessary and you just need to turn into some useable interface?
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- abramN 4y agoI actually have the candidates do FizzBuzz! And, it's still amazing how many people can't figure it out, or try and BS their way through it by proposing using a crazy data structure like a B-Tree (true story).
- randomluck040 4y agoI have a serious question: what kind of job is that? Like what is the job description? I‘m currently working in academia in geoinformatics (mostly with image data, json files and data frames in general as well as the occasional Spatialite or Postgres database) and have no idea where I’d end up outside of academia. I don’t know how good my programming skills are, I don’t know what kind of job I could/will get and what life would look like for me outside of academia.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoThat's both amazing and disturbing. If you ask me to write FizzBuzz, I can do that with my eyes closed. If you asked me to write FizzBuzz using a B-Tree, I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to do it. By the way, after they write FizzBuzz, ask them to modify it so that it prints "Rawr" or something if it's divisible by 7. If they printed "FizzBuzz" if it was divisible by 15, do they change their approach? If not, keep adding more strings for more prime factors until they do, or until they melt.
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- randomluck040 4y agoFor me the question would be what to print: do I print "Rawr" for e.g. 105 or do I print "FizzBuzz" now? What do we prioritize? Am I missing something?
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoYou would print "FizzBuzzRawr".
- alexgodin 4y agoWhat questions do you have for me? Works for non-software engineers too. Filters out if they've done any research at all into our work and if they're curious.
- dangus 4y agoI don't like this question in some cases. What if they prepared with specific questions but you answered them during the interview? What if a previous interviewer answered their outstanding questions? Is curiosity about the company the trait you want to optimize for? In other words, does that curiosity translate to job performance? I also think this question being so open ended and vague will lead you to get a lot of bad/blank answers. What should I be asking questions about?
- prewett 4y agoI have a standard question I ask (in addition to any other curiosity questions): "what is one thing you like about the company/work environment, and what is one thing that you would change if you could?" After a few people it gives a decent picture of what the down sides are.
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- nitwit005 4y agoI'm 90% sure I was rejected by a github recruiter for not having questions. The problem is I know a decent amount about github, and the product the role related to. And, as you might expect, people do tend to put the answers to the common questions in the job description.
- pwinnski 4y agoDo you know how team dynamics work day-to-day? What the relationship between the product team and developers is like? Who drives new features? How is work assigned and scheduled? How big are teams? What are teams structured like? Is there frequent movement between teams? Ask questions that aren't easy to find out without asking current employees, and that don't put employees on the spot. I can do that for hours. With execs, questions turn more to product roadmaps, marketplace fit, revenues and budgeting, but again, I bet I can come up with interesting and practical questions longer than any slot any interviewer has in their calendar. It's possible that the recruiter was expecting questions like the above, and saw your reasonable confidence as either over-confidence, incuriosity, or both.
- pyuser583 4y agoWeb development: list and discuss HTTP methods.
- gamegoblin 4y agoFor a low level programming backend job: Tell me everything you know about the hash table data structure. Plenty of Staff level applicants don’t know anything about it. There are 3 tiers of answer: 1) Don't know what a hash table is, when to use one, etc. Have never had a candidate in this category this do well in the rest of the interview, even for totally unrelated tasks like distributed system design. 2) Know it's a key-value store, know it's "fast". Some candidates whose main experience is in frontend dev get to this point, and then demonstrate other ability in the rest of the interview and get hired. 3) Rattle off that it's O(1) amortized, might be O(N) in the resize case, chaining vs linear vs quadratic probing vs other clever methods like cuckoo hashing, discuss how those methods effect cache behavior, etc. These candidates typically crush the rest of the interview effortlessly, even totally unrelated tasks like distributed system design.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y agoWhen I was in college, I had recently implemented hash tables in a data structures class and was interviewing for internships. I gave a detailed answer like (3). The interviewer told me that it was the best answer he’d received for that question. Now I have several years of experience and am a much more effective engineer. I don’t remember many of the implementation details of a hash table anymore, but I still know how roughly how fast the operations are. I guess I wouldn’t be applying for “low level programming” jobs, so the expectations are different. Still, I think I’d be better at it than younger-me who just learned data structures.
- ayberk 4y agoThis^. OP is basically just filtering for people who have experience building hash tables.
- spfzero 4y agoFor people with recent experience building hash tables. What sticks over the years is how you work with them and where they are a good solution to a problem. The more experience you have in using them, the less likely you are to remember how to build them, because that information was never used and got pushed out of memory by all of the other things an experienced developer needs to remember.
- zhala 4y agoWe've found that asking them to write a function to average a list of integers. That's filtered out a surprising number of "senior level" applicants.
- acapybara 4y ago
- pklausler 4y agomean = liftA2 (/) sum length
- Kranar 4y agoI mean that could satisfy the interviewer, but for me if I asked that question, I'd want an answer that protected against overflow and unfortunately the naive solution is prone to overflow.
- whatshisface 4y agoThat could turn in to a very complex question in that case because dividing too many separate sums before adding would introduce rounding error.
- anyfoo 4y agoDoes that not have to be mean = liftA2 (/) sum (fromIntegral . length) ?
- 6510 4y agowith(arr)eval(`averaaaaaage=(${join`+`})/length`);
- weitzj 4y agoI don’t don’t do this kind of questioning. I find it useful to give an open question like: Design a website with a user login, a password reset feature. And then go on from there. E.g. talk about how to build your infrastructure. How to protect against CSRF. What is your stance in tokens in the front end. What about sessions. How to do force logout. Which database, why? When to use caching. How would you store Information about a password in a database in a safe manner. Salting hashing. Synchronous vs asynchronous api. Idempotency. Different database transaction mechanism. How to do monitoring. Why is cardinality important for prometheus. How to do api first design. This gives the candidate time to shine and I can at least understand where they are. And you can dig deeper.
- rockemsockem 4y agoWhat do you change if it's clear that the candidate is completely incapable of doing any of those things? Do you cut it short? Talk them through it step-by-step? Unfortunately I've found that not all candidates who get through a recruiter can do what they say they can, so I keep a question at the very start that eats up maybe 5-15 minutes (sometimes less) for a good candidate, but some very bad candidates spend a full 45 minutes on it and don't finish.
- 1ark 4y agoThe interview will be very short once you've gone through your questions, that's all. For your 5-15 minute question, I don't know the nature of it, but why don't you just move on with reference to time? I'm sure you have a lot of other questions you should ask. It is on the interviewer to be the timekeeper of the interview.
- rockemsockem 4y agoI was curious about the parent commenter's approach with the sorts of questions they ask as they are more open-ended, but also somewhat knowledge-gated. I was interested in any potentially unique techniques they employ. However, I was not looking to specifically fix anything with how I conduct my interviews. My first question is a very specific coding question and it's a weed-out question. So if someone doesn't figure it out, they've been weeded out, simple as that. I ensure that candidates don't waste time figuring out nit-picky edge-cases and give appropriate hints when they're utterly stuck, but the question does its job very well.
- adamcrow64 4y agoI like to know that candidates can recall their study. For engineers, one of the biggest mathematical learnings in their degree is the study and use of imaginary numbers. In Australia this is taught in year 11/12 and is taught to kids who show aptitude towards STEM. Identifying these early adopters has worked well for us. So the go to question that we use a lot is "What is the square root of minus one?". This culls a lot of non mathematical people. (And we find that Mathematical people generally make for better STEM employees in a tech setting). If they answer correctly (and many who get through the initial resume culling process do) then we follow up with a second question that is not important to answer but will show a candidates sense of curiousity (super important). What is the answer to the first question to the power of the answer to the first question? Fascinating answer to this second question that can delight the candidates we are after.
- jackblemming 4y agoYou might want to phrase it as the square root of negative one in the future.
- osrec 4y agoWhy?
- RhysU 4y agoBecause "minus" is the boolean subtraction operator not the unary negation operator despite a lot of colloquial misuse by native speakers. The distinction is useful when reading aloud expressions like 3-(-2) as "three minus negative two".
- osrec 4y agoPerhaps, but "negative one" would sound a little odd to lot of people from certain countries, including the UK, where "minus one" is the standard way of referring to a negative number. We would be perfectly okay with hearing "three minus minus two" in mathematical context.
- leros 4y agoI don't like filters like that as they're too black and white. Your idiot filter might test something the interviewee is knowledgeable or not knowledgable about. I have questions with a variety of add-ons, so I can tune the difficulty to each person. A more junior person might take 30 minutes to give a complete answer while a more senior person might finish the base question in a few minutes so I need to add things on to make it more difficult. Some people might not have the ability to solve the problem at all. Either way, I try to get the interview to a place where the interviewee is beyond their ability to easily spit out answers. Then the interview should turn into a back and forth discussion where they're asking me clarifying questions and possibly getting completely stumped. Either way, now we're communicating and seeing how quickly they can learn and utilize new information. That might be providing them clarifying info or teaching them something they don't know yet. I don't care if someone can answer FizzBuzz or spit off facts about hash tables or anything like that. All that can be learned. If I'm interviewing a developer, I want them to be able to work on a project in a programming language they've never used and doing things they've never done before and become reasonably competent in a few weeks of learning.
- zulban 4y agoSounds like you're thinking about filters the wrong way. You're not finding gold, you're quickly filtering out the poop. > I don't care if someone can answer FizzBuzz .... All that can be learned. Of course. But... sometimes it isn't. If a software engineer cannot do a question like FizzBuzz (and this does happen) then you can save a lot of time by cutting short the interview. If you're hiring SEs who cannot FizzBuzz, then I wish you the best of luck. This isn't some leetcode or data structures trivia question that excellent candidates might fail. This is a test that I cannot imagine any good candidate failing.
- chomp 4y agoI think people get optimistic about the quality of candidates out there. FizzBuzz winds up being "do you know what modulus is", which screens out so so many candidates. So many. There's a difference between a diamond in the rough who many not know $lang or $datastructure but is proficient elsewhere, and candidates that literally cannot put together a basic looping conditional. It's like hiring a network engineer that doesn't know what a network route is.
- valbaca 4y agoFinding unique values (i.e. Deduplicating) using a Set/HashSet; hell, even just using a HashMap with boolean keys would give a passing grade (esp in languages like Go where that's how it's done).
- mathrawka 4y agoGo would use the value as the key and boolean or `struct{}{}` for the map value.
- _whiteCaps_ 4y agoSimilar in Python
- d23 4y agoNearly ten years ago I was asked FizzBuzz over the phone. As in: program it by talking. I'm 90% sure I got it correct, but I believe the interviewer didn't understand the logic of negation on a zero modulus result and I didn't pass. It worked well as a filter for me for that company. Coincidentally, they're on the front page right now for layoffs. So be careful with this kind of stuff. You may not be filtering what you think you are.
- Kranar 4y agoCan you explain what you mean by "the logic of negation on a zero modulus result"? That sounds like a mouthful, does it just mean that the interviewer didn't know that "!(x % 2)" is the same as "x % 2 == 0"?
- d23 4y agoYeah something like that. I probably misworded it and my memory is fuzzy after such a long time.
- cameronh90 4y agoWhat is a semaphore? I wouldn't say you're an idiot if you don't know the answer, but we need people who can work with concurrency and a surprising number of developers haven't.
- whatshisface 4y agoYou don't usually use semaphores directly in modern programming languages. Go does everything with channels and Rust covers a lot of cases with static analysis, and has built-in high level concurrent primitives for the rest.
- jmrm 4y agoEven if it's not available (I haven't programmed in Go), I think most of programmers who run parallel code in Go know what is a semaphore or a mutex, don't you think?
- cameronh90 4y agoPerhaps so, but the synchronization primitives leak out eventually, e.g. while profiling or debugging. Semaphores also exist in other contexts, like POSIX/IPC, distributed semaphores etc. Even if you did manage to avoid them entirely, it would suggest a lack of curiosity if you've never looked into how concurrency is implemented beneath the surface.
- fffrantz 4y agoFunnily enough, coming from a telecommunications background, a semaphore will always make me think about Claude Chappe and his optical telegraph [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph
- pklausler 4y agoIt may have been ruined by this year's Advent of Code, but for over a decade now my standard warm-up question has been: Write a Boolean function that determines whether two closed intervals [a,b] and [c,d] overlap. No loops are required, no data structures, no algorithms, really: just a simple predicate expression. It is one example of what I think of as "programming in the small", this basic survival skill of being able to relate some values and correctly characterize a situation. You just have to be able to do this correctly if you're going to write correct if statements and while loops. Lots of bugs boil down to errors in examples of this kind of expression. I've had PhDs from good schools write doubly-nested loops looking for a point in common. I've have very experienced engineers write expressions that have false negatives or false positives. A depressingly small proportion of candidates can think of a good way to test their answers.
- zulban 4y agoThat's an interesting approach and question. I think I might use that. Thanks!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- RhysU 4y agoI happened to want a generalization of this problem once and I went down a long rabbit hole: https://github.com/RhysU/intersection https://github.com/RhysU/intersection Tests, QMC, the works.
- yesenadam 4y agoI've been programming for decades, and I had to google what "closed interval" means exactly.. I even read quite a lot of mathematics. I don't see the term very often, and manage to forget which is "open" and which is "closed". Guess I don't get the job. :-(
- blamestross 4y agoIf radix sort is O(n) why don't we use it for everything?
- Kranar 4y agoBecause radix sort is not O(N). It's a common misconception and luckily most modern algorithms books do not make that mistake anymore, although it seems to have been common in the past. Radix sort is O(k * N) where k is the length of the key, and it's worth noting that there is a fundamental dependency between the length of a key and the size of a data set in that k scales with log(N), so that ultimately radix sort is O(NlogN). So at this point it just comes down to comparing radix sort against other sorting algorithms in terms of constant factors, and radix sort certain has some use cases, but not many. One area where it excels is sorting enormous data sets that can be parallelized.
- blamestross 4y agoYou passed! Common less correct answers: - Because it only works on integers and you need comparison for general sorting. (Wrong, you can embed basically anything you want to sort into a fixed width int) - Wide eyes and staring silently I like this as a filter question because: - skips directly to, do you know CS fundimentals - requires them to tell me I'm wrong (if they can't do that thier competency is irrelevant) - requires that they actually think about the implications of what they were taught and reconciles them against reality. If you don't have those qualities, you probably won't be useful as an employee or coworker.
- matthewwolfe 4y agoI rotate through various simple function implementations. It’s important to stick to fundamentals and not introduce anything where a specific context is required. Examples of this are - function to reverse a string - function to sum an array of integers - function to get a deeply nested property value from an object Since I work a lot with React and also interview people for that, I use the following to determine if people are at least somewhat familiar with react: - take a static array of objects (first name, last name) and render a list of those objects If people can’t write the map function, or are confused about the console warning for needing “key” that is usually a great indicator that they don’t actually know react. What consistently surprises me is that I’ll interview people with 5-10 years of directly related experience, who will see questions like this and laugh or say it’s trivial, and then absolutely bomb. One person complained that they were senior and above these types of questions, and then spent 20 minutes trying to reverse a string.
- arcturus17 4y agoThat’s strange, it’s taken me like 2 minutes to think of three methods of reversing a string, depending on what you want, space efficiency (use two moving pointers and operate in-place), simplicity (use a new array and a loop starting at the origin’s end), functional semantics (use map() and a bit of modulo math)… I’ve written a lot of software but I wouldn’t even consider myself a professional programmer. What happens to these people, do they get really nervous or do they really not know?
- matthewwolfe 4y agoI think there probably are people that get nervous and absolutely blank, that is bound to happen. As an interviewer, what can you really do in those situations? Also to note that looking up documentation is perfectly fine, and I explain that as well. As for others, I think some people graduate out of writing code when they become senior, or something similar. But we make it very clear that senior/lead engineers are primarily writing code, so I don’t think it is a mismatch of expectations. Other people are genuinely overstating their skills and are no programmers. The incentive to lie is there, based on how much money a programmer can make.
- ergonaught 4y agoMy "idiot filter" occurs when parsing resume/CV. If they make it to an interview, and I have to ask "idiot filter" questions (ex: FizzBuzz) to decide whether they're a fit, then I am the idiot in need of filtering. And sometimes I am.
- jedberg 4y agoI use Fizzbuzz like you said, and it works like a charm. Interviewing at Netflix I cut at least 1/2 the candidates with that one. People who list "Senior Software Engineer" on their resume but can't write a loop using mod in their favorite language. I question how much you've coded if you can't write a simple loop and Google was allowed!
- melenaboija 4y agoI think this question describes pretty well the profile of some of the interviewers I have found in my live. I also find helpful that this appears on the top of HN and as an advice for the newcomers to the space: "you will find people that want to proof you are an idiot, and more specifically that you are and the interviewer is not"
- wellthisisgreat 4y agoSerious question - what kind of book should one read to get into a mindset of answering such questions? Like fizzbuzz? I understand I can just gptoogle many of the questions, but is there a reading that can help to get to such a mindset from fundamentals? It's clearly not something like "Code Complete"
- wara23arish 4y agoWhen I was in college, cracking the code interview book was decent.
- djkivi 4y agoGo to Leetcode and start doing problems.
- silvertaza 4y agoI even go as far as avoiding writing code in the first place. You can give a very simple imaginary problem to solve and see how they think. I believe good software engineers are essentially problem solvers, the code just happens to be the tool for it. I have asked to estimate the amounts of skittles in a litre cube box.
- pklausler 4y agoIf nobody at your company requires a candidate to write code, you won't filter out the candidates who can't code, and they'll be working with you, not with companies that require candidates to write code. Even the easiest five-minute coding problem is better than nothing.
- silvertaza 4y agoYes, but the OP asked for an idiot-filter first. We end up applying multiple filters throughout the process, but try similarly to keep them as simple as possible not to too strongly bias for one thing.
- wink 4y agoI find that a horrible question. I've not had skittles in years, are they as big as smarties? I think a little smaller? Sure, you can start your estimation by laying them down in a 10x10 grid, and stacked 20 high, but that's very far off. Maybe 13x13x20? So that would be the most loosely packed version, if we shift them off so that layer+1 is in the depressions of layer+0, maybe we can stack 30 high. So yeah, that's my best mathematical approach and I guess it's at least 50% off. Did I pass?
- ChymeraXYZ 4y agoa = 7 b = 9 Write a program to make a == 9 && b == 7 No, I don't care how many new variables you use and what language you use. Yes, I had people not be able to complete this. I would say this is something that is so basic that: a) It's not testing any knowledge b) It's basic enough that you can figure out under stress, while never seen it before c) It's short, easy to explain (in 5 different ways if need be), and easy to validate d) It's an idiot filter. It doesn't even test if you can program, it's more like "If you know how type out code, are you also capable of reasoning about the basic logic of that code".
- chad_strategic 4y agoMaybe you should ask a question of yourself. Why are you wasting your time and someone else if you think they might be an idiot? I suspect it’s the OP unwillingness to find the good in people or find commonalities interview process. That's not a positive method to approach an interview or conversation. If I knew that an interview was going to be a "gotcha" type interview, I would politely pass, I don't need this nonsense.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago> Why are you wasting your time and someone else if you think they might be an idiot? Because I need to hire someone competent. And idiots can (and do) still write good-looking resumes (or get someone else to write it for them).
- chad_strategic 4y agoI guess those idiots are either resourcefully enough or have the creative writing skills to fool you into a interview? Hmm...
- notacoward 4y agoI ask them to ask me their "idiot filter" question. If they just jump into it, I'll learn something about where they draw that "competence" line - almost invariably just a hair below their own level. If they hesitate, we might have a much more enlightening discussion about why that's such a problematic phrase, and how they feel they would fit into a team that spans different skill types or levels.
- zulban 4y agoTo me the best filter questions have these features: 1) Obvious: If the question is failed, even a non-technical hiring manager understands how bad this is. 2) Fast: Quick to ask, quick to answer. Everyone agrees in advance that if it's failed, we can shorten the rest of the interview. 3) True negatives: Some bad candidates might pass the test. But no good candidate will fail. 4) Real: Write real code live in any programming language. Emphasize that perfect syntax is not important. I've helped interview candidates for student positions, programming teacher positions, junior and intermediate programmer positions. It is shocking to some how often people fail filters like this. My current favourite: In any programming language, write a program that prints the numbers 1 to 100, except if the number is divisible by 3, then print "turtle" instead. Example: 1 2 turtle 4 5 turtle 7 ... 100
- anyfoo 4y agoWell formalized, I fully agree with that list. It's applicable to pretty much every field by just finding a question that fits all those 4 points (with the obvious alteration of #4, depending on the field, e.g. for a mathematician "perfect notation is not important for this interview" for example).
- ziffusion 4y agoI think it is important to remember that you are catching a person on their journey of acquiring and internalizing information. The reservoir of available information is almost limitless - so no one is going to come close to knowing it all. No point in testing for that. We all navigate the world on different trajectories through this network of information - so your milestones may not be the same as theirs. No point in confirming that theirs are the same as yours. What you want to look for is their ability to process information, ability to internalize it, and their ability to bring it to bear in solving the problems they will be confronted with. You may have to do this with markers that don't necessarily match your own. The richness of the network of information they have acquired so far is a marker. The nuances of the insights into that information they have acquired is a marker. The organization of this information into readily usable tools is a marker. These are what you should be looking for, rather than some preconceived ideas of what the markers need to be.
- dave333 4y agoSpeaking as an idiot trying to get hired in the depths of the dot com bust for programming in javascript that I did not yet know two that stumped me were: Is javascript case sensitive (I got the answer right purely by guessing, but the hesitation gave me away) ? What is a closure?
- nunez 4y ago"tell me about a project you built recently." not idiot-proof but enough to inform me on what level we're working with, what their thought process is like, what tech they know, etc.
- gilbetron 4y agoHow many operations per second can a modern CPU perform? thousands, millions, billions, trillions?
- yetanother12345 4y agoNot being from the USA this has been an interesting and a bit shocking read. To me this approach to job interviewing seems overly paranoid, suspicious, and akin to harassment. Also asking random general riddles that are not specifically related to the specific job function in question seems so weird that if I was the Interviewee I would seriously reconsider if such a company would be worth working for at all as disrespect like this in the interview process would likely be reflected in overall company culture. Disclosure: I do not even know if the title "Software Engineer" in the USA requires a formal education as such. I do not hold that title myself, I've just been working in IT for three-plus decades and provided net positive bottom line value to every firm I've worked for along the way. Most, if not all, of the "idiot-filter questions" (note the tone?) in this thread, I've seen for the first time today.
- oceanghost 4y agoI ask for a truth table for AND or OR. You won't believe how many programmers can't answer this question.