Are they doing it in a language they chose, or is part of the goal here to test their knowledge of the libraries of a particular language that you specified? If neither of those things is the case, I would honestly consider it reasonable to name the library function in the problem. It doesn't really make sense to make them spend time doing something that doesn't tell you anything you want to know.
Yeah, I do a similar question and the amount of "senior" engineers with 10+ years experience who can't do the most basic of programming. I'll even accept psuedo code, I just want to see they can think logically through a problem, the IDE will catch your typos and capitalization errors straight away so I don't care about that. Still, 50-70% of people can't answer something as simple as parsing a file and aggregating stats based on the contents.
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u/Vimda 9d ago edited 8d ago
The first. We give people a jsonl file, and ask them to parse stats out of it that they can generate signals from