coding challenges as part of interviews: yes or no?
tonystubblebine: This reminds me of a group of main frame programmers I knew who had been forced to become Perl web developers. About a month later they were asked to hire another Perl programmer and one of their interview questions was what's the difference between 'chomp' and 'chop' (chomp removes the final character of a string if it's a newline, chop does it regardless).They were shocked that the interviewee didn't know the answer because they considered it basic knowledge, "it's in the first chapter for gosh sake." The first chapter in this case covered differences between Perl 4 and Perl 5.In Perl 5, nobody uses 'chop', they all use 'chomp.' Many experienced Perl programmers might even have forgotten that 'chop' existed.And that's my major problem with gotcha questions, they tend to be pretty far from measuring if a person can actually write productive code.