Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of the interview is not to answer "Can this candidate find and fix this bug?" but rather "what is the candidate's approach to fixing unknown problems?" A good performance looks like making a hypothesis for where the bug is, testing that hypothesis, and repeatedly narrowing in closer and closer. Finding and fixing the bug is irrelevant! A bad performance might look like - running out of hypotheses for what m…
Sorry, but do you have any data that shows 'great' candidates run tests and use your approach of finding / fixing bugs? Read the book 'Coders at Work' which describes some of the best developers of all time - most of them use print statements to find bugs / debug. Btw, I've solved bugs in 2-5 minutes which some developers spent hours or days working on (to their amazement) -- I've done this countless times in the pas…
Re: Bug squash: An underrated interview question
#281I agree with you, print statements or just simply reading the code (or modifying the code and then testing) can do wonders.