Well I know that I've solved a few problems in my time: like developing a multi-threaded distributed object-oriented control system, implementing a JPEG2000 encoder, a convolutional neural net, as well as solving a number of debugging problems that escaped my colleagues.
I also know I failed miserably at a trivial coding task in an interview.
So I don't know. If I'm the only one who has that kind of problem, maybe my brain works differently from other people's.
How trivial? What was the task, then? And what where the conditions? Were you required to remember some nitty details? In an interview, you can fail in almost anything, depending on how nervous you are.
The problem was: given the following prototype implement the function
void move( char** colNames, int toColumn, int fromColumn );
The function should move the column name at index fromColumn to the position toColumn. (It does not swap the columns.)
Now I just spent 43 min implementing this with a compiler and some trial and error.
During the interview I was expected to do it with pen and paper.
Now my IQ is above the 99th percentile but apparently there are people who can do this sort of thing in their head without errors and that's what some interviewers appear to be looking for. That's why this post hit home for me, though personally I probably wouldn't have had much trouble with linked lists.
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Well I know that I've solved a few problems in my time: like developing a multi-threaded distributed object-oriented control system, implementing a JPEG2000 encoder, a convolutional neural net, as well as solving a number of debugging problems that escaped my colleagues.
I also know I failed miserably at a trivial coding task in an interview.
So I don't know. If I'm the only one who has that kind of problem, maybe my brain works differently from other people's.
How trivial? What was the task, then? And what where the conditions? Were you required to remember some nitty details? In an interview, you can fail in almost anything, depending on how nervous you are.
The problem was: given the following prototype implement the function
The function should move the column name at index fromColumn to the position toColumn. (It does not swap the columns.)Now I just spent 43 min implementing this with a compiler and some trial and error.
During the interview I was expected to do it with pen and paper.
Now my IQ is above the 99th percentile but apparently there are people who can do this sort of thing in their head without errors and that's what some interviewers appear to be looking for. That's why this post hit home for me, though personally I probably wouldn't have had much trouble with linked lists.