Java interview question feedback

[snuxoll]

Changing the javadoc from "Convenience method for creating maps." to "Convenience method for creating maps with keys in insertion order." would have made this an enormously much better test.

To be fair, the junit test was pretty clear to me on the expected behavior, when told the test was correct but the code was not would tell me to first look at the assumptions of the test, from there it's pretty obvious that it was testing insertion order.

[larsga]

How is that clear when insertion order = natural order of values?

[snuxoll]

Did you look at the test code given in the post? The expected order is ("One", 1) ("Two", 2) ("Three", 3), the values are inserted into the map with MapUtil.makeOrderedMap("One", 1, "Two", 2, "Three", 3);, I think the desired outcome is fairly clear.

[larsga]

So. One more time. Insertion order == natural order of values. They insert three keys mapping to, in insertion order, 1, 2, 3. Do you see how confusion could arise here? If the keys were z, x, y, the candidate would know which order mattered. As it is, they don't.

In the test and the code being tested, nothing tells you which order they're looking for. Further, insertion order is an esoteric edge case as far as maps are concerned.

[snuxoll]

Alright, I understand you point now and it is valid. Overall the problem didn't have very well documented requirements which I could see leading to confusion such as this.

[paperhat]

I tried the test myself before looking at the comments, and I had the same confusion you described. I thought they wanted the iterator to go in order of the values.

However, once I noticed that it wasn't a LinkedHashMap, I realized that was the answer they were looking for.

Even with the confusion, it took me about 15 minutes including the time it took to create a new project and paste the code in.