With one of many job applications I did, I received a small coding exercise before getting to the actual interview.
It was about writing a small application in perl (one of my favorite scripting languages) to solve a problem. It was a number converter from arabic to roman and vice versa.
Anyway I started by looking up a perl module that solved the whole thing in 3-4 lines of code.
What was the answer? Sorry that's not we wanted. We would like to see, how you would solve it with general code.
So you're saying that doing investigation work, finding an existing working solution and applying that solution is not a good answer for you?
Sorry but that's how I work. I find a problem; I investigate for a solution; if there is one I use it and implement it; if not then I will write one.
The moral of the story is: interviewing is fundamentally wrong and doesn't help you find a good candidate. There are millions of good solutions to one problem in programming. Asking for a solution you want to see and not a solution that solves the problem will never help. Then why don't you clone yourself and have an army of developers which work the same way and produce the same code with the same flaws over and over and over.
It was about writing a small application in perl (one of my favorite scripting languages) to solve a problem. It was a number converter from arabic to roman and vice versa.
Anyway I started by looking up a perl module that solved the whole thing in 3-4 lines of code.
What was the answer? Sorry that's not we wanted. We would like to see, how you would solve it with general code.
So you're saying that doing investigation work, finding an existing working solution and applying that solution is not a good answer for you?
Sorry but that's how I work. I find a problem; I investigate for a solution; if there is one I use it and implement it; if not then I will write one.
The moral of the story is: interviewing is fundamentally wrong and doesn't help you find a good candidate. There are millions of good solutions to one problem in programming. Asking for a solution you want to see and not a solution that solves the problem will never help. Then why don't you clone yourself and have an army of developers which work the same way and produce the same code with the same flaws over and over and over.