coding challenges as part of interviews: yes or no?
gcv: A trivial coding problem is essential. I've seen people with 10 years of experience in XML#Java.NETEnterprise2012 who don't understand conditionals, loops, or boolean expressions.For phone screens, I find Steve Yegge's guide a useful starting point: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-scre...I'm not a fan of asking candidates to reverse a string or to implement atoi or a binary search, because those have corner cases which, under interview pressure, might be too much to ask for. I just ask for an implementation of a gcd (greatest common divisor) function, in any language. I always explain the problem in detail. Only one guy (a PhD in physics) ever gave me Euclid's algorithm (section 1.1 in Knuth's AOCP Volume 1), so I don't expect it. I do expect a trivial loop, and most candidates take 15-20 minutes to come up with it, and need lots of hints.As far as I'm concerned, anyone who can't come up with a trivial loop (or recursive or tail recursive function) for something like this shouldn't be programming for a living. Maybe "developing enterprise solutions," but never programming.