The Problem with the FizzBuzz Problem — Gayle Laakmann McDowell

The Problem with the FizzBuzz Problem — Gayle Laakmann McDowell

There's a certain category of questions that fall into that sweet spot of "takes a tiny bit of thinking but not too much." Those can be used to validate early on some basic level of competence. Clearly, if they can't do a basic coding exercise, you know you can eliminate them.

Here's a problem that I like along these lines (this is from the soon-to-be-released 6th edition of Cracking the Coding Interview):

Given a list of people with their birth and end years (all between 1900 and 2000), find the year with the most number of people alive.

There are some more interesting algorithms for this problem, but people should be able to come up with a basic brute algorithm. Many, however, can't.

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