[njd]

I'm a retired data architect and C developer with 36 years of professional experience. In my opinion, this is not how you find an appropriate candidate. It would be better to ask substantive questions that are related to the thing you are making. What does this person bring to the team? How will the team receive this person? Has this person delivered something of substance in the recent past that would convince you that he/she would succeed on your project? How was this person an asset on their previous job?

[ng12]

Sounds to me like that's a really god way to hire people who are really good at bullshitting.

The absolute hardest thing about hiring developers is hiring people who I can trust to write code. Most applicants are just not adequate programmers and any other redeeming qualities they have can't overcome that core deficiency. I need people who can look at different ways to solve a problem, implement an approach that makes sense, and explain why it does. I need code reviews to be about architecture decisions and correctness not lessons on how to write code. If someone can't do that I really don't care how well they can sell themselves as an "asset".

[fiedzia]

Those are questions for juniors. Most likely they had no previous job at all. The only thing they can bring is potential, and this question tests it rather well.

[cableshaft]

Doesn't stop people from asking these questions of people at all levels. I still get asked these coding questions pretty much every interview I have had, and I have almost a decade of programming experience, and have even been lead programmer on some projects (without the title).

I've been asked a barrage of these questions for senior positions, even.

Especially sucks because I don't usually program terribly fast or well in an interview environment, so I look worse than I actually am, and often get put on the defensive in these interviews, which I absolutely hate.

[brudgers]

It does not really test potential because a junior trained in Java has poor tools for flattening a list because idiomatic Java would not represent hierarchical data structure as a nested list. Idiomatic Java would use tree and node objects. Idiomatic Java also prefers arrays over lists for sequential data.

An experienced programmer might look at the problem and choose a better tool: a different language or call a service or rewrite the offending code that produces a nested list or any one of a dozen things that are not bashing away with the hammer of Java.

[walshemj]

yes its a very artificial Q a better one might be how would you use a computer to measure how efficient 100 different toilets are :-)