"and one wrote something that looked suspiciously like COBOL - still not sure if he was trolling me."
That's brilliant. Now I have to learn myself some COBOL just for that.
You will need to write a lot before you even start solving the problem.
Re:How to Pass a Programming Interview
by titanomachy on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @07:03PM
(#11249831)
My pseudocode used to be a sort of relaxed Haskell, because it's closer to how I think about a solution... but some interviewers rejected it as not resembling any kind of code, so now I use something imperative and Pythonesque, which hasn't gotten complaints so far. The sad thing was that in some cases the Haskell "pseudocode", unlike the Python, would have actually compiled and solved the problem quickly (within a factor of ~4 of C), and it took me about a minute to write.
Unfortunately I think Haskell is disproportionately well-suited to these kind of toy problems, so being able to answer interview questions in Haskell doesn't tell the interviewers much except that you think yourself especially clever.
Re:How to Pass a Programming Interview
by toomuchtodo on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:32PM
(#11247839)
> Ack. I'm not sure how I'd react to that.
Thank them for their time, leave, move on to next company.
I interviewed quite a bit last year (on the hiring side). I was really surprised by the variation in pseudocode written by the candidates. Most wrote something JavaScript-like, a few stuck to mostly proper Java or C. But then one dumped a giant web of crazy on the board (but still made his point) and one wrote something that looked suspiciously like COBOL - still not sure if he was trolling me.