Spooge's Spit Up - Nepotism Trumps Interview

Simon had a great job. Every day he was playing with cool hardware and software, he liked his colleagues, and the pay... well... OK, he was underpaid. Vastly underpaid. While his company made good on their promise to give him a raise once he got a C certification, it was an insulting two figures. Simon would've felt less insulted if they'd literally slapped him in the face (instead of figuratively). It didn't take him long to line up some interviews and get a job offer for a position that sounded just as interesting, with the added benefit of a reasonable level of compensation.

Once Simon made his intentions to leave clear, his boss started worrying — they needed someone to take over for Simon, and not having any spare staff, they had to hire someone quick. Simon's boss pulled him aside and asked him to draft a test with some basic questions to weed out the hacks.

Simon got started on a test that had questions ranging from braindead easy to moderately challenging. He tried to come up with questions that would make someone think, but not frustrate them. Ten questions seemed a reasonable amount, so that was his goal.

The first question was one of the harder ones — "Explain how a modulus 11 checksum works and write an example of how it would work in pseudocode." The next several questions were about simple VB and C syntax (remove an element from a linked list, write a sorting algorithm, etc.). The last question, however, was tough.

You're writing code in a programming language that you've never used before. You have no documentation about the language except the other code. Complete the following function: ...

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Thanks The Daily WTF