Re: Programming challenges leading to a job?

Romeo Colacitti wrote:
Richard Heathfield wrote:
Romeo Colacitti said:

If you live in toronto/kitchener/waterloo/hamilton area of Ontario,
Canada, and you are a good C programmer, take a look at this:

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/careers/sample_problem.html

If you're a good C programmer and you decide to take this job, you should do
so only on the understanding that whoever writes the specs should be fired,
or moved over to the marketing department. They obviously aren't up to the
job of writing specs.

Hmmm. He even gives an example of what he is expecting, so I don't see
where the confusion "could" come from.

Let's start with the title: "The Combo Button Lock quiz problem".
Is it a quiz or a problem? Normal parsing would be that it is a problem of "the combo button quiz". That is inaccurate. It could be called a problem or challenge (not a quiz), but not a quiz problem.

Examples should illustrate and confirm the specification that has already been made. In several instances, new rules are apparently defined in the examples:
1. [can't] use a button more than once
2. does not use ANY buttons [isn't allowed]
3. must not push more than two buttons at once

In the following example, two rules-from-examples contradict one another:
1-2 3-4 (any number of buttons together)[are allowed]
and
1-2-3 4 (must not push more than two buttons at once)

The use of the term "combinations" is wrong, mathematically, for enumerating possible sequences, but is passable in context because of the colloquial "lock combination" used to mean a sequence of numbers, not just a mathematical combination.

--
Thad
.

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