> In interviews I have people program a function to rearrange characters in a string, appropriately named "SimpleProblem", and >50% of candidates with experience can't write a function that compiles and solves the problem.
I would struggle with this problem, because it's difficult to read whether you want me to push back against the requirement itself and try to solve the real problem instead of shuffling chars, or perhaps you want me to talk about the edge cases you're likely to encounter while I write the naïve solution, or maybe you want to pretend it's the 80s and nothing outside your chosen charset could ever exist in real data.
I would struggle with this problem, because it's difficult to read whether you want me to push back against the requirement itself and try to solve the real problem instead of shuffling chars, or perhaps you want me to talk about the edge cases you're likely to encounter while I write the naïve solution, or maybe you want to pretend it's the 80s and nothing outside your chosen charset could ever exist in real data.