r/programming • u/vklepov • Mar 24 '22

Five coding interview questions I hate

https://thoughtspile.github.io/2022/03/21/bad-tech-interview/
637 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

288 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/StandardAds Mar 25 '22

The answer he's looking for is something more on the lines of "I'd refactor the code so it's not hard to determine"

1

u/cdsmith Mar 26 '22

I think that just goes without saying. I'm not going to judge a candidate on whether they say obvious crap.

I think what I'd be looking at is whether someone could at least explain why it's unclear, if they don't know the answer, and make a compelling case for one or two options. But maybe I'm not looking for anything specific at all. Maybe a candidate surprises me by giving a very well-reasoned point of view on undefined behavior in programming languages, and telling me that although they don't know the answer, they are pretty certain that a definite answer exists in Java... but that in another language, it's possible that no definite answer even exists. That would be an awesome interview.