My boss sent almost the whole staff today an email with the subject “funny”. He wrote that he asked one of the interviewees he had to write a simple recursive function to calculate the factorial of an integer (n!) using any programming language he likes. And that person replied with “Can I use Assembly language?”. Boss said if that person can do it then he’s hired 🙂 🙂
What do you think?!
3 Comments
I’d never hire that person.
While assembly might be the fastest language, one has to choose the language he uses depending on how much people know it, it’s ease of learning, how widely spread it is. Assembly is definitely not known by a lot of people.
Keep in mind that in most cases, assembly is not faster than C. Modern compilers can optimize code in ways one can’t imagine.
The 2nd thing is this looks like a “showing attitude”. Is he going to resume this attitude after being hired ? He’d be better of writing it in more than one language (Assembly is included in them).
Beside, using assembly for this task is an overkill.
And before I forget, assembly is not the suitable language for this task. A programmer is someone who knows how to apply the programming techniques to any programming language (Except visual basic, C# and .NET :-)) and to use the suitable language for the task.
Writing a web application in C/C++/asm will make it – in theory – the fastest on earth but is that true on the practical side ? and what are the consequences for doing that ?
Of course I’d have loved to know his rationals behind using assembly.
and hey, please don’t tell me that the main interview question was that ??
Cheers,
I so agree with the .Net exceptions 😀
hehehehe
I was really shocked when I knew about that choice. I thought he only knew assembly or his attitude needs to be changed as you said…
And I was more shocked to know that this question was asked in an interview..when I applied, he didn’t ask me that..and I’m not sure if i’d be working here now if he asked me to write such function 😀 kont halemm nafsi wakhrog!
I heard they’re hiring fresh graduates and giving them intensive training courses (there’s a whole department for training, more like a small school). so maybe he’s looking only for programming basics…I don’t know..still weird!
unlike M.Sameer I would hire this guy.
Because obviously the interview question is not to test which language is the most suitable for the task, its just if he knows how to program.its a n! … not a stock market exchange software.
So the interviewee is a smart ass and wants to show off, so he will do it in assembly.
which takes LOTS of lines btw.
Assembly is taught at first year in LAU when I used to be there, by the 4th year everybody has forgotten all about it, because we never ever really use it, and the tasks were stupid then, like add 10 and 15 or something like that.
So to be able to do n! then he looked things up on his own, so he is a self improver.
definetly a guy to be hired.