Comment by anonymars 3 days ago
I get the impression you latched on to the word leetcode and took away something very different
FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way out of a wet paper bag, not elite and esoteric skills that need advanced study and cramming
If someone doesn't know how to reverse words in a sentence they are absolutely not qualified to be a programmer. Yes they probably won't do this exact task often, but this is like a doctor that can't distinguish heart from the liver. It tells you something has gone horribly wrong.
In many languages, the basic version can be just one line of code, if you know the right libraries to leverage. C# leveraging Linq, for example:
String.Join(" ",
String.Split(" ", sentence).Reverse()))I’ve never had an interview question that asked me to do something straightforward. If I did get a question like that, I would be immediately suspicious about what the catch was.
For campus, we ask very straightforward questions to try to weed out the very lowest of coding fluency at that early stage. (Basically to try to guard against late track changers who haven’t actually coded but know that the SWE market is better than whatever their original interest was.)
If I ask that of a senior candidate, it’s because I got a whiff of “this candidate might not be able to code at all, and I’d like to save us both some time and frustration.”
Similar concept. You have them do some task like fizzbuzz to see if they can program stuff on the fly that they would never need to do in real life. You practice that since school doesn't prepare you for that unless you do ACM programming contests or something. The interview demands this to see if the candidate is capable of cramming for the interview, which correlates with the effort, ability they could put into the job, not with what the skills they actually apply on the job, which are hard to measure in a one hour interview slot anyways.