Interview

I saw a post on LinkedIn in which the author published his optimal solution to a coding interview problem. The challenge involved searching a sorted array. Any cheatsheet would tell you that the best solution to the problem would involve a binary search. If you are using C++ for purposes for which the language was created then you probably know that any textbook solution is suboptimal until proven otherwise. When I contacted the author of the post with a request to add benchmarks to illustrate how the optimal solution outperforms the naïve implementation I got a somewhat puzzling reply that he had no means to profile his code.

A few days ago I came across a post on LinkedIn that discussed an interesting Python interview question. The task was to reverse a string. When a candidate produced an idiomatic solution my_string[::-1] the interviewer asked to try again without using conventional string slicing. At this stage the puzzled candidate began to question the sanity of the situation and sank into some sort of an existential crisis.