Re: Interview question

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 8:50 AM, Wilson, Jonathan
<piercing_male@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

what is meant by "leave it in the same place", what about "words" that
are less than 3 chars...

I suppose the verbiage of the instructions contains cultural,
educational, and linguistic biases, the same way many, many
standardized test questions do. I'm pretty sure it has been shown that
at least some of the performance difference between different ethnic
or socioeconomic groups comes down to these kinds of biases in the
folks who come up with the test questions.

I'm solidly in the demographic of "understands the lingo of
standardized test questions", and I can assure you, fairly or
unfairly, the language is pretty clear for those of us who are "in the
club".

Nowhere did they say "leave it in the same place". The actual phrase
was "appear ... in its original relative location". This does have a
specific meaning, if you speak the lingo. It means: if Char1 came
before Char2 in the input, then Char1 must come before Char2 in the
output. Also note that this rule only applied to the non-alphabetic
characters.

And there is definitely no logical conundrum for two-letter words.
There *might* be some issue with one-letter words, but if they are
judging in good faith (as I explained in one of my earlier posts), you
can probably just present a reasonable case for your chosen
interpretation and go with it.

(3) Is it trying to show they noticed that the result is not a compound
of the 3 parts, but is instead solved only by doing the 3'rd part as it
overwrites everything before it, with comments showing that part 1 and 2
are not required because they are thrown away and its actually a
"gotcha" question.

It's definitely not trying to show this. You might have been tripped
up by unfamiliar terminology in the instructions, or you didn't read
the instructions carefully enough.

I also hate the type of questions that are designed to show you know
every op-code and its structure and all the F spec column positions off
by heart when thanks to PC's, PDF's, multiple monitors/windows, and the
internet, if there is something I don't know - I can look it up on the
fly.

This I totally agree with. Even without all those aids, I think if you
will be judged on having actual, working code, then you should at
minimum be allowed to actually compile your code and fix as necessary.

John Y.