Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions!” Now they have two problems.
– Jamie Zawinski
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll quote Jamie Zawinski!” Now they have two problems.
– anon
Just to show that I practice what I preach, I headed over to TopCoder a few hours ago to try my hand at some simple TCHS problems. By my surprise, the problem I opened was very similar to one of the technical interview questions in my previous company. I know this because as a technical interviewer, I’ve already given this problem to a couple of potential employees.
Now this isn’t surprising. Basic algorithm-related questions are good filters for weeding out so-called “developers” who never really had much programming practice in college, but there’s only a few types of questions you can ask at this level–go any higher and you’ll likely be stuck with Complicators instead of pragmatic programmers.
Anyway, what struck me with this problem is that it can also be solved with regular expressions. This has never occurred to me before, mainly because I didn’t expect even the top students from the top universities in the Philippines to approach the problem that way. From my experience, I would expect applicants to play around with loops instead.
This made me ask myself the question:
If you were a technical interviewer, how would you rate an applicant who used regular expressions in solving the problem?
Continue reading “Technical Interviews and Regular Expressions”
