People suck at technical interviews (2014)
With one of many job applications I did, I received a small coding exercise before getting to the actual interview.<p>It was about writing a small application in perl (one of my favorite scripting languages) to solve a problem. It was a number converter from arabic to roman and vice versa.<p>Anyway I started by looking up a perl module that solved the whole thing in 3-4 lines of code.<p>What was the answer? Sorry that&#x27;s not we wanted. We would like to see, how you would solve it with general code.<p>So you&#x27;re saying that doing investigation work, finding an existing working solution and applying that solution is not a good answer for you?<p>Sorry but that&#x27;s how I work. I find a problem; I investigate for a solution; if there is one I use it and implement it; if not then I will write one.<p>The moral of the story is: interviewing is fundamentally wrong and doesn&#x27;t help you find a good candidate. There are millions of good solutions to one problem in programming. Asking for a solution you want to see and not a solution that solves the problem will never help. Then why don&#x27;t you clone yourself and have an army of developers which work the same way and produce the same code with the same flaws over and over and over.