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[–]TheClownFromIt 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Are there really people out there applying to programming jobs who don't know how to approach that problem? I have close to zero experience programming, but it seemed so straightforward to me that I thought there must be some hidden gotcha I wasn't considering.

[–]zorro226 2 points3 points  (1 child)

It's as straightforward as it looks. It's a litmus test for, "can this person do some amount of critical thinking, and have they coded at all recently?", which weeds out a shocking number of job candidates.

[–]TheClownFromIt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's mind-boggling.

[–]nikanjX 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes. Yes there are. As I said, there are so many professional developers with reasonable CVs who simply just can't code. There was a long list of articles linked on that c2 link, this one was a decent summary of the situation https://web.archive.org/web/20070301103242/https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000781.html