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.
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.