It's also a mostly useless problem for determining engineer quality, in many cases. It tests for pure coding ability, when most organizations should be optimiz

It's also a mostly useless problem for determining engineer quality, in many cases. It tests for pure coding ability, when most organizations should be optimizing for engineers that are going to be productive-if-not-spectacular, that can design and build maintainable systems. Could I have written the above problem back in my engineering days? Probably not, since I went years not working with threads. But I also wasn't working on problems that would ever have benefited from knowing that. Most software engineering roles are essentially building CRUD or ETL systems, maybe with a user interface. Any coding problems given should be optimized for weeding out bozos (which are still plentiful), not for weeding out the most people.