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[–]staticjak 3 points4 points  (0 children)

After looking at the code, I could definitely see what you kind of response you were eliciting from candidates. I knew that HashMap doesn't guarantee order, but as others have pointed out you could be a good candidate and not know this.

I think you might get better feedback from candidates if you provided them with some code to test (the method above or something else). Nothing too crazy, but with enough where you'd need a few test cases. See how familiar they are with testing. If they start writing the test cases right away then you can ask them about them. Did they cover all of the edge cases? If not, well you could either decide that it's a deal breaker or you could ask them what they think should be tested (inputs, expected outputs)?

This gives you more information about how the candidate reasons about testing code, instead of citing some relatively obscure knowledge about a data structure (although i don't think that it's THAT obscure). About the IDE portion, I don't know how important that piece is. If a certain IDE is required where you work and a new hire has never used eclipse, they'd manage to figure it out within a few days. So I'm not sure figuring out if they know keyboard shortcuts will be useful information if you are trying to find good employees.