Over the years, I’ve seen a number of blog posts relating to common questions that should be asked of programmers. Obviously, this is going to depend on exactly what position you are hiring for, but there are some good “gateway” questions that can be used to determine whether or not an applicant you are interviewing can … well … even program at all. If they even have the mindset that makes a good developer.
A common one I’ve seen tossed around is Fizz Buzz. The challenge goes something like this:
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.
Now, to anyone who even has a basic understanding of programming, this is super simple to solve using a modulus operator. But apparently many people applying for even entry-level development jobs cannot solve this problem. According to the article linked above, even one “senior developer” took 15 minutes to solve this problem.
Earlier today, a friend posted something on Facebook that inspired what I think it another good, intermediate to difficult level programming question that also looks for pattern recognition. The relevant part of the post began by stating: “This year July has 5 Fridays 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays.” There is the question! It would go something like this:
The month of July 2011 has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. Calculate the next 50 times there will be a month that has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays.
Woah, so how to go about solving this problem? Well, look at a picture of July 2011. Notice something interesting about this month in relation to the question? This month has 31 days (the most any month can have), begins on a Friday and ends on a Sunday. And that’s the solution! It’s any month with 31 days that begins on a Friday!
With this in mind, it’s pretty easy to come up with a PHP solution:
<?php
$count = 0;
$num_found = array();
while(count($num_found) < 50) {
$count++;
$ts = strtotime("$count months");
if(date("t", $ts) == 31 && date("N", strtotime(date("Y-m-01", $ts))) == 5) {
$num_found[] = date("F Y", $ts);
}
}
print_r($num_found);
?>Note that I make use of PHP’s strtotime function, because it is the Swiss Army Knife of date manipulation in PHP. This would need to be adapted for use in another language.
So now tell me: what are some other questions you’ve been asked or asked in an interview?
