Easiest interview question

Yesterday I arrived at 8:45 and left at 17:40.  Nearly nine hours interviewing for a new job.  I’m not sure how many people I talked to.  In my mind they merged into a blur of coding tests on the white-board.  “Write your own version of malloc() and free().”  “Implement a function that converts a ASCII string into a floating point number.”  “Reverse the order of the words in a string.  Do it in place–without allocating more memory.”  “Find the first unique character in a string.”  “Write the test cases for your code.”  “What is the big O of your solution?  Can you do it better?”  Those are just the ones I remember.  My right arm went weak from writing on the white-board for so many hours.  I remember the easiest question though.  “What gets you up in the morning?”  “My wife”, I answered.

Update: I’ve been getting calls and email asking how it went.  It went well.  Only the smallest of glitches.  The 8.5 hours of interviews with eight different people today in a different group was generally easier except for one technical question that I severely crashed and burned on. 

And the toughest question yesterday?  “Show me a cure for spam email.  You have 45 minutes.”

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3 thoughts on “Easiest interview question

  1. That sounds pretty tough. I have often thought, over the years, of leaving the Blue Ridge Mountains and going to Idaho. I have a brother who stays there part of the time and everything I hear about it is good. However, at 53 the idea of pulling up stakes and starting over is daunting. I’m not sure I could find work out there, either.

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