Selection processes for software developers can get very colorful. Sometimes, lots of weird stuff unrelated with the actual job get asked by people that can’t tell apart code from magic spells.
However, what intrigues me the most are the nonsensical “technical” questions made by allegedly technical interviewers.
Recently, some friend of mine got asked to implement in any programming language a function summing a sequence of floating point numbers. The catch? You should implement at least 10 versions and they should be as different as possible.
I didn’t see what they were after. You can ask for a very simple thing like summing numbers in the spirit of FizzBuzz, but why asking for many different versions?
The funny thing is that the job opening was related with Java development and thanks to the accidental complexity of arrays vs collections and the streams of Java 8 you can have many, many ways of summing numbers. For example:
I wonder if, after all, this was deliberate…