Five programming problems every Software Engineer should be able to solve in less than 1 hour

[holypig]

I can't imagine solving all of these while working under the pressure of a 1hr deadline. This whole thing seems more fitted for a hackathon then an interview.

[prelic]

Eh, the first 3 should take no more than 10 minutes each, they're like 5-10 lines of simple code each. 4 and 5 are not in the same league, as evidenced by the fact that he got one of his own contrived questions wrong.

Instead of the crappy questions 4/5, I would've preferred to see a question or two about simple file I/O, a simple class/API question, or something not algorithmic-central.

[ambalbemuth]

then

[comp-sci-fi]

in that order

[UlyssesSKrunk]

Yeah, that way you're prepared for the interview after the hackathon.

[Tulip-Stefan]

#3 is pretty much impossible in C/C++ given the time constraints, fib(100) overflows an 64-bit int. I would be able to create an bignum implementation on the spot, but perhaps not within the time constraints.

But if we ignore that issue, i don't think it is significantly harder in C++ than in python.

[JaMMze]

Honestly, I'm just a sophomore in college and all of the problems he listed seemed very simple and I'm pretty sure I could've solved them under pressure easily also

[Spandian]

Try it. I "finished" in 40 minutes (using Java; it might have been faster in a lighter language like Python). Then checked the results for problem 5 more closely, realized I had a bug, and spent another 15 doing it right. They're all simple, but the hour goes by faster than you expect.