The Interview Paradox

If you have been a developer for more than a few years, there will come a time when you change jobs and you face the dreaded technical interview. The really bad thing about this is that you'll get asked about stuff that you'll have not touched since your previous interview. It's what I call the interview paradox- no matter how long you've been in a job, most likely it will have been maintenance and you'll rarely have to start from scratch. It's truly amazing how much syntax you can forget over a couple of years! The paradox is that no matter how much you know, when it comes to an interview you have to relearn a large part of it again. Normal programming only touches a subset of most languages.

So here is a short programming problem for you. Give yourself 5 minutes to do this and write it out by hand on paper without a compiler or editor to help you.

You're given a small 2 dimensional array that is 10 wide by 8 deep. Now just write code that will sum up each row and sum up each column and put the row totals in an extra column and column totals in an extra row. In technical terms it is trivial and yet...

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