[jonnycoder]

Hah I feel you there. Around 2 years ago I did a take home assignment for a hiring manager (scientist) for Merck. The part B of the assignment was to decode binary data and there were 3 challenges: easy, medium and hard.

I spent around 40 hours of time and during my second interview, the manager didn't like my answer about how I would design the UI so he quickly wished me luck and ended the call. The first interview went really well.

For a couple of months, I kept asking the recruiter if anyone successfully solved the coding challenge and he said nobody did except me.

Out of respect, I posted the challenge and the solution on my github after waiting one year.

Part 2 is the challenging part; it's mostly a problem solving thing and less of a coding problem: https://github.com/jonnycoder1/merck_coding_challenge

[lupire]

Enjoy the ultimate classic tour de force from world treasure Chung-chieh (Ken) Shan’s wikiblog "Proper Treatment"

discussion / punchline http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/WordNumber...

Start of main content: http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/WordNumber...

[userbinator]

Part 2 is the challenging part; it's mostly a problem solving thing and less of a coding problem

That doesn't look too challenging for anyone who has experience in low-level programming, embedded systems, and reverse engineering. In fact for me it'd be far easier than part 1, as I've done plenty of work similar to the latter, but not the former.

[jonnycoder]

Yea it’s pretty easy after doing them, but it’s rare for software developers these days to do that activity on a day to day basis. It reminded me of the software crackers of the 90s and 2000s who would post cracks for windows software like autocad.

It’s also relative because a $50/hr contract job isn’t exactly attracting low level FAANG engineering talent. But it’s a nice take home challenge for some second rate engineer like myself who will tackle any problem until I figure it out.

[MarcelOlsz]

That sucks so hard man, very disrespectful. We should team up and start out own company. I tried checking out your repo but this stuff is several stops past my station lol.