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Consider yourself fortunate, I've screened candidates who didn't get past the "for" keyword because they couldn't construct a loop in a language of their own ch

Consider yourself fortunate, I've screened candidates who didn't get past the "for" keyword because they couldn't construct a loop in a language of their own choosing, even after I reminded them that perfect syntax is not necessary. I've had a surprising number of candidates who did not know about the existence of the modulo operator. Not just "I completely forgot about it", but more like "what's the % sign mean?".

spamizbad 14y ago
I'd forgive an entry-level candidate (straight out of college) for not knowing about the modulo operator. We had one who solved it correctly using floor/ceiling. If they're claiming 3+ years of experience though, I'd say not knowing about modulo is a red flag. It means they're being dishonest about their actual experience, or those 3+ years of experience are very narrow, and/or they're not terribly curious about the field.
swivelmaster 14y ago
I once had a candidate claiming to be a senior PHP programmer solve fizzbuzz by doing something like this: if (strpos($i/3, ".") != null) or something like that. I was sad.
- Someone 14y ago
  I googled to see whether this was creativeness or just copying stuff from the net, and came across http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.arithmetic.php http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.arithmetic.p.... It states: "Operands of modulus are converted to integers (by stripping the decimal part) before processing." => 4.5 % 1.5 is zero, as is 4.6 % 1.9. So, in the world of PHP, there may be logic in that strpos approach. As far as I can tell, it certainly isn't much worse than http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?76114-Work-out-if-int-is-a-multiple-of-3 http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?76114-Work-... advocates. And no that is not worth much. I know almost nothin about PHP, and prefer to keep things that way.

spamizbad 14y ago

I'd forgive an entry-level candidate (straight out of college) for not knowing about the modulo operator. We had one who solved it correctly using floor/ceiling. If they're claiming 3+ years of experience though, I'd say not knowing about modulo is a red flag. It means they're being dishonest about their actual experience, or those 3+ years of experience are very narrow, and/or they're not terribly curious about the field.

swivelmaster 14y ago

I once had a candidate claiming to be a senior PHP programmer solve fizzbuzz by doing something like this: if (strpos($i/3, ".") != null) or something like that. I was sad.

Someone 14y ago
I googled to see whether this was creativeness or just copying stuff from the net, and came across http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.arithmetic.php http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.arithmetic.p.... It states: "Operands of modulus are converted to integers (by stripping the decimal part) before processing." => 4.5 % 1.5 is zero, as is 4.6 % 1.9. So, in the world of PHP, there may be logic in that strpos approach. As far as I can tell, it certainly isn't much worse than http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?76114-Work-out-if-int-is-a-multiple-of-3 http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?76114-Work-... advocates. And no that is not worth much. I know almost nothin about PHP, and prefer to keep things that way.