Why can't programmers program? Is "Print 100 to 1" (with one tiny catch) too hard an interview question for programming positions?

Generally speaking, that's what they tell you. I've seen it go spectacularly in the wrong direction. I applied for a job a few years back, they gave me some insulting "homework" to do before I'd be granted an interview. I just refused point-blank. They rejected me. Fast forward to a few weeks later and I've been brought on to that team anyway, via an external consultancy that were much more interested in my ability to solve their actual problems than my ability to do homework. There's a slight moment of embarrassment and awkwardness all round, and we get on with it.

Then I start hearing the rest of the team vet other people's "homework". It was disgraceful. They were nit-picking exactly on things like "this idiot hasn't changed the package name!" and "this guy has used a semi-colon, you don't need those in Groovy" and rejecting candidates for the most petty reasons. Then it got more serious. They were rejecting people for not writing unit tests. What's wrong with that? Well, remember, I'm inside that team now, and I have full knowledge of just how seriously they take their unit testing. Clue: not very. There were barely any tests at all, what tests there were were all about that sweet happy path, and a bunch of them were simply commented out because nobody could get them to pass. Oh, and all the CI builds had been subtly mis-configured to not actually run any tests, but nobody had noticed. Nobody ran tests locally because "we have Jenkins" but of course Jenkins hadn't run any tests in about 18 months. The team were holding candidates to really stupid pedantic standards and to perfectly rational standards to which they did not hold themselves, even slightly. That's the real problem with tests like this; despite all good intentions, the people setting and vetting them are not guaranteed to be qualified to do so.

Amusing addendum: the team hired me directly as early as they possibly could after finding out I was actually quite a useful guy to have around. I hiked my rates to 50% above what they were originally going to pay me, as asshole tax, and quit a couple of months later.

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