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Most candidates cannot solve this interview problem

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Re: Most candidates cannot solve this interview problem

#5
post #2

This is trivial for me to solve, sitting here at my computer. Would I be a me to solve it on a whiteboard in front of a group of interviewers? Maybe not. The stress and anxiety may get the best of me.

I agree with you; it is easy solving sitting at the computer, but in front of a group of interviewers might be stressful like that.

The method to solve it depends on the programming language. In this case, I would use Haskell; however, this would likely be a part of a larger program, and in that case the programming language that the larger program is written in would be used instead.

Re: Most candidates cannot solve this interview problem

#6
post #4

Clickbait title

Given that those exact words are the first line of the tweet and that it is almost the entire point of the post, what alternative title would have been better?

Something like "Most candidates that I interviewed cannot write a function that does run-length encoding"

Re: Most candidates cannot solve this interview problem

#8
This is seemingly the software equivalent of those trivial order of operations problems you see reposted over and over again on Facebook/Twitter.

I can never tell if the objective is to give novel solutions to the problem or to just publicly show that you can solve it. In any case, I always chuckle when I see how some of those in the comments can reply so smugly to others.

Re: Most candidates cannot solve this interview problem

#9
I think this approach might backfire: If purpose of the question is to test the candidate's knowledge of common libraries, then it probably is way to easy to be indicative, this kind of knowledge should be tested for something the candidate can't find by googling for 5 minutes. If the purpose is to test algorithm design, its also way to basic.
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