Scott blogs about a weird problem he had with ASP.Net, and then asks “Could this be a good problem solver question for an interview?”
Certainly, some people would take days to solve this problem. Personally I think I would have taken less than 10 minutes. You see, I find that a lot of times the brute force approach works:) A re-boot would have solved it...
Of course - brute force often leaves you asking “so what actually went wrong there?“ , but sometimes perfectionism is not the best thing.
But is it good for an interview? maybe just to see people coping with it on a timed basis. There should be no need to actually finish on time, but just so that the interviewer would get a sense of how the person goes on to solve a problem. I think facing a problem like this I'd be kinda getting a pale-faced look, but I'd be able to solve it, especially now that Scott blogged about it. It's going to be plastered over the first search result in google tomorrow.... :)