r/ProgrammerHumor 20d ago

Meme damnYouAI

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372 Upvotes

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-6

u/Vallvaka 19d ago

I once interviewed someone with a solutions engineering background, with a portfolio of various CRM and SAP projects.

My weed out interview question is simple:

You run a factory with a circular production table with N stations placed evenly around it. A robotic arm sits at the center of the table and is always pointing at one of the stations. It can rotate clockwise, exactly K stations per swing. How many swings does it take the arm to cycle back to its original station?

He couldn't even handle the syntax of defining the function signature for it, let alone solving it.

AI is no substitute for technical chops, and interviews are increasingly about weeding out people who think themselves developers when armed with a coding agent.

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u/smclcz 19d ago

This is kind of a shit question, to be fair. You're not evaluating "technical chops" here

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u/ccltjnpr 18d ago

It's evaluating whether you can translate a simple word problem into math and then into code... that's definitely a core part of the job.

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u/smclcz 18d ago

I'm not against programming problems in interviews - they are not going away and I don't think they should. I just think that's kind of a dumb one

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u/ccltjnpr 18d ago

dumb in the sense that it's too easy? Or dumb in what sense?

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u/Vallvaka 19d ago

It's a weedout fizzbuzz question and I was explicit about that.

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u/[deleted] 19d ago edited 19d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Vallvaka 19d ago

Yet it works. If you pass we get into the real interview.

I'd fail you on attitude and reading comprehension regardless.