I’ve been using an easier version of my coding question lately, because candidates have struggled so much. First I moved it from C to C# (or Java, if candidates only have a java background). Then I simplified it, a lot. The problem is simple: reverse a string using no outside libraries. This was an introductory-level when I interviewed at Microsoft but now it seems to be advanced!
I’ve had candidates waste 40, 50 lines of code answering this. They usually don’t answer the question at all (they won’t write the full function with signature, or they reverse any words w/o reversing the characters, etc.).
I tried it again last night against .NET 3.x—I wanted to make sure I wasn’t expecting too much--you know, maybe programming has changed while I’ve been in meetings! ;).
I ended up with a small challenge (converting my char[] so it returned a string—kept returning the object type), but other than that, this went really well. 15 lines of code, including curly braces and the step to convert from the input string into a char[] (no error handling; have to get to that next)
Is the question too difficult? Wanna take a stab? Can you beat 15 lines, without using string.Reverse()?
