That's totally a question I'd ask, and I don't understand why you don't like it. The reason I'd ask it is not because it's a simple task, it's because it's not a simple task: what I'm looking for is that you aren't going to over-confident-ly throw naive solutions at hard problems. That will cause bugs and have to be cleaned up.
I think if you showed me an implementation that hinted at some of the complexity lurking in the task, that would be a big point in your favor.
I think it depends on the interviewer and the purpose of asking the question. For a phone screen I'd expect it to be a variant of FizzBuzz, designed to weed out the people that aren't worth wasting time on. Coming up with a complex solution, when the interviewer was looking for something simple, is probably grounds for a fail - even if the complexity is justified.
Re:Moving Away from Python 2
by ubernostrum on Sunday May 22, 2016 @01:14AM
(#11747435)
Yeah, a lot of places use it as an initial phone-screen "can you code" question.
I did bust out a version on one call which did detection of combining classes, normalized into composed form before checking the reverse, etc., and the interviewer seemed kinda lost as I explained it.
Ended up not working for them, but for different reasons.
After a while I started creatively expressing my dislike of phone screens by showing them an implementation that hints at some of the complexity lurking in this allegedly-simple task (i.e., you need to understand Unicode classes and normalization in order to write a palindrome tester).