[coev]

The article is from someone whose final-boss interview was with...joel spolsky. And it was a pretty useless-in-the-real-world question he was given as a coding exercise (base -2 number conversion).

[yodon]

The base -2 question was asked by someone other than Joel, and definitely fits in the category of interviewer vanity questions.

[darrenkopp]

Yeah interview before Joel was base -2 conversion. Joel's interview was mostly a chat and we mostly talked about my dog (and other things I'm sure but I only remember talking about dogs).