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A comment on The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten. Parent comment

Re:The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten by ankrgyl on Sunday April 17, 2022 @09:42PM (#31066413)
The rubric was more of a "Y/N" for this question. But we'd refer to the author's solution as "great". Messier solutions would involve a lot of copy/pasta and occasionally inefficient or incorrect implementations that tried to repeatedly add.

I can't remember exactly, but I probably administered the question for Arthur when he interviewed (he may remember). I do (fondly) remember working with him.

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Re:The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten by FartyMcFarter on Monday April 18, 2022 @02:58AM (#31068129)
A "solution" that repeatedly adds would seem to violate the atomic property, so I think I would call that invalid and not an actual solution?
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Re:The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten by the_af on Monday April 18, 2022 @04:20AM (#31068478)
The author of TFA mentions these solutions usually acknowledge the need for atomicity, and try to achieve it by reusing memcached's locking primitives. I understand the failure is that either they don't get them right or use up all their time without a complete solution.

To be honest: it's how I would have failed this question.

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