Async Queue – One of My Favorite Programming Interviews (Can AI Break It?)

Re:Async Queue – One of My Favorite Programming Interviews (... by craftkiller on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @12:55PM (#44512291)

On the contrary, these are great questions to raise at the start and I'd absolutely rate a candidate better for asking them. Too many of my coworkers solve the wrong problem. They treat the symptoms instead of finding the root cause, and so we end up with a fragile patchwork of dirty hacks that get cargo-culted into other code bases.

That being said, the time spent on these questions should be minimal. It should go something like:

  Candidate: It seems like we're solving the wrong problem. Why can't the server handle multiple simultaneous requests from a single client?
  Interviewer: Its a 3rd-party server we don't control. (or even just a "because those are the artificial constraints for this puzzle" if the interviewer is feeling particularly lazy)
  Candidate: Ah okay. <proceeds to work on the problem>

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Re:Async Queue – One of My Favorite Programming Interviews (... by sfn42 on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @01:38PM (#44512806)

Sure, that's completely reasonable. But getting hung up on them for an hour is ridiculous.

I also think they're unnecessary in the first place. I wouldn't hold it against anyone in a scenario like you described but I also wouldn't expect it. Solving the task as it's posed is good enough.

I might just mention that my first instinct would be to fix the root of the problem instead of asking about it, I wouldn't expect the interviewer to have spent time world building for their made up task.

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