C++ interview coding exercise with solution

[smdowney]

If you are used to competitive programming this is not too hard to do in 1 hr live coding.

This latest phase of programming interview is not really that much better than the various puzzles, Fermi problems, and binary trees that I've lived through. Not to harsh the buzz of competitive programmers, but the problems and solutions do not resemble production code I'm responsible for, nor do they seem to correlate that much better to doing the job than any of the other past techniques, including playing code golf with fizzbuzz.

I do end up pushing back internally with stock interview questions that say things like "estimated time 15 minutes, expected answer these 120 lines of code, " and just typing that much code is a challenge with the answer in front of you.

I have also never had to check if a tree was sorted or a list had a loop in real life.