Well I don't know what is being tested here. grep is a fairly old utility, which might have bugs which I don't deny. But these utilities have been debugged to complete stability by now.
Besides grep itself was built on work done by other people before.
GNU grep uses the well-known Boyer-Moore algorithm, which looks
first for the final letter of the target string, and uses a lookup
table to tell it how far ahead it can skip in the input whenever
it finds a non-matching character.
If the idea here is to test if the candidate can come with the Boyer-Moore algorithm in an hour then I doubt something like that is even possible. Things like that are not invented by some one in an hour, the original inventors themselves likely spent a life time studying and working on problems to produce anything novel.
On the other hand memorizing other people's work, which they themselves took years work in discovery, in the current of Google look-up-able knowledge, literally proves nothing. It's the exact opposite of a person capability to produce things.
The whole idea of a take home test is to demonstrate capability. If submitting a working project under a tough deadline doesn't pass that test, then Im not sure what the hiring panels are even trying to do here.
Besides grep itself was built on work done by other people before.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug...
GNU grep uses the well-known Boyer-Moore algorithm, which looks first for the final letter of the target string, and uses a lookup table to tell it how far ahead it can skip in the input whenever it finds a non-matching character.
If the idea here is to test if the candidate can come with the Boyer-Moore algorithm in an hour then I doubt something like that is even possible. Things like that are not invented by some one in an hour, the original inventors themselves likely spent a life time studying and working on problems to produce anything novel.
On the other hand memorizing other people's work, which they themselves took years work in discovery, in the current of Google look-up-able knowledge, literally proves nothing. It's the exact opposite of a person capability to produce things.
The whole idea of a take home test is to demonstrate capability. If submitting a working project under a tough deadline doesn't pass that test, then Im not sure what the hiring panels are even trying to do here.