I was interviewing a couple of months ago, and one of the in-person technical interviews wanted me to write, on a whiteboard, a function that took in a timestamp and calculated the angle between the hands on a clock set to that time. After I did that they wanted me to reverse engineer the linux “tac” command for files of unknown size that I could not store the contents of locally, resulting in probably the most sinful piece of code I’ve ever written.
What really gets my goat about it, is that out of all my interviewing companies, they were by far at the bottom of the list, and was really only interviewing to get negotiating power. My company had worked pretty closely with them, so I was well aware of the poor treatment and absurdly high turnover rate, so they were really in no place to be picky. My top choice company’s hardest question was one of those basic college programming math questions where the answer is “use the modulus operator”.
A lot of the time it’s just an ego trip for the interviewer to show off how clever they are and to gloat over the interviewee when they can’t figure out some really hard problem. This actually fits perfectly with the company having a toxic working environment. When you see these kinds of questions in interviews it’s usually an indication that these aren’t the kinds of people you’d want to be working with.
I was interviewing a couple of months ago, and one of the in-person technical interviews wanted me to write, on a whiteboard, a function that took in a timestamp and calculated the angle between the hands on a clock set to that time. After I did that they wanted me to reverse engineer the linux “tac” command for files of unknown size that I could not store the contents of locally, resulting in probably the most sinful piece of code I’ve ever written.
What really gets my goat about it, is that out of all my interviewing companies, they were by far at the bottom of the list, and was really only interviewing to get negotiating power. My company had worked pretty closely with them, so I was well aware of the poor treatment and absurdly high turnover rate, so they were really in no place to be picky. My top choice company’s hardest question was one of those basic college programming math questions where the answer is “use the modulus operator”.
A lot of the time it’s just an ego trip for the interviewer to show off how clever they are and to gloat over the interviewee when they can’t figure out some really hard problem. This actually fits perfectly with the company having a toxic working environment. When you see these kinds of questions in interviews it’s usually an indication that these aren’t the kinds of people you’d want to be working with.