I'd give you brownie points but still expect you to answer the question. These questions are not THAT hard - they are definitely fair game and help screen out the people who only know how to use APIs and not how to think about things at a lower level.

But I agree an array would be a more efficient data structure for this :)

Another problem I have is that I get terrible anxiety in the interviews and my brain shuts down. I've made a personal decision for my own well-being not to participate in these types of interviews, no matter the circumstances. At that point, it's in the company's court. I will happily demonstrate in many ways that I've solved these problems and more complex problems before. Including narrating my code, papers, articles, body of work, speaking of my aspirations as a data scientist / developer. Talk about learning JavaScript from Crockford and what I've learned. Opinions on DHH's Agile v4 and convention over configuration. The truth is, I research every problem I have (at least a little bit). I never sit down and blindly program or do math problems.

I'll never forget my former Bell Labs-theoretical statistican advisor (American. Stat Association decorated!) telling me about accidentally helping his high school-age daughter fail on a take-home probability problem for school.

I have this same problem. Unfortunately, I'm not currently employed, so it's quite a handicap in the interview process.

You should look at smaller companies, most of them seem to have figured out the whole package counts. If you're a hacker like I am, it's a dream. Little bit of everything across your domain (but quality). Plus, you might even learn what's necessary to run the show!

That's where I'm currently looking. My biggest problem is identifying the companies. Being in the Bay Area, it's more a problem of how and where to search than limited number of companies, though.

I think I'd fit in with a company far enough along to have built its MVP (so they're not always in that perpetual crunch mode), but which has fewer than 10 engineers. I really value work-life balance, so I don't want to work insane amounts of overtime all the time, but I could totally live on a below market salary if the other aspects of the job were right.

I'm considering working with a recruiter. Anyone know any technical recruiters in the Bay Area who are worth working with?

Oh, and as always, my email is in my profile if anyone wants to take this discussion offline.

Pretty picky for a guy without a job.