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I was a teaching assistant for multiple courses at a UK university. There was an introductory functional programming course, and two other functional programming based courses that followed up from that. The courses all had large practical programming exercises, and exams at the end.

However, every year there would be a good amount of students that did the follow up courses, that would not even know how to define the simplest function, use/define a list, etc, when I was trying to help them work on the practical exercises. These were weekly voluntary 4 hour labs in which we were available to help them and there was no performance pressure.

Somehow they always had a solution by the end of the deadline despite getting stuck during the labs. Of course this was often clearly copied. However, I was strongly discouraged by the lecturer to ever make an issue out of this, even when at one point a student handed in a copy with someone else's name on it. Basically the university barely dared to formally accuse students, and the lecturers also didn't want to deal with the hassle.

Most of these students ended up passing the module, and later on the whole course. It made me really sad/frustrated.

It did help setting expectations when performing interviews for software engineers at certain companies I worked in the past. I would ask a candidate to use their most comfortable programming language and would start with a simple version of a problem to get them in their comfort zone. Sadly, I would often have to simplify that multiple times, and ended up with candidates that could not write a single function, for loop, while loop, interface, class, or any other component of the language they actually wanted to use.

While IMO your example was rather specific to C, I've certainly met candidates who can't write a for loop who I've felt similar things about.

Perhaps people get stressed in interviews?

For instance, I don't code in C that often, and if asked, I'm not sure I could remember off the top of my head if the function signature is `memset(dst, value, n)` or `memset(dst, n, value)`. My guess from intuition is the first, but I would be hemming and hawing a bit if asked in an interview something like that.

Also, many CS programs are easy enough that you'll never even encounter a memset.

From my personal experience (and that of many friends of mine) who interviewed at Google, you won't be asked about memset or any C-related question unless you stated you were proficient in C and picked C as your interviewing language.

Knowing this context might actually explain the situation that the parent comment describes a bit better. It is absolutely possible, as you described, to be perfectly capable within your CS niche without ever bothering with memset. But in that case, you probably won't pick C as your interviewing language and won't state that you are proficient in it. Which is what, I suspect, might have happened in that scenario the parent comment is describing.

> you won't be asked about memset or any C-related question unless you stated you were proficient in C and picked C as your interviewing language

I might not ask about C-specific context, but if you don't know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you have no business being a SWE at Google.

>I might not ask about C-specific context, but if you don't know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you have no business being a SWE at Google

I know quite a few engineers who passed Google interviews and work there, and they wouldn't know how to do this off the top of their head. I also interviewed with Google a few times, and not once was I asked a question like this.

Also seems weird you would say that they have "no business being an SWE at Google", given that this problem is pretty trivial, and any competent engineer would be able to figure it out after some quick googling. It isn't some difficult algorithmic problem, it is a very specific and small piece of trivia.

Having performed interviews at Google for about 5 years, I don't think the needing to "know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes" is representative indeed. Many of current junior candidates use Java/Python in which it seems too niche a question to be a valuable signal for a hiring committee, particularly if it's for general SWE. Either you've dealt with this problem before and you know it, or you'll struggle.

> too niche a question to be a valuable signal for a hiring committee

I feel like I must be taking crazy pills, but this thread is definitely derailed at this point, so...

I don't hesitate to take a hard stance on this. If you don't know off the top of your head how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you are an incompetent programmer and are unfit for the profession. That is indeed a VERY strong signal to a hiring committee.

It's like interviewing to be an IP lawyer and now knowing what the types of intellectual property are, or interviewing for a copy editor and now knowing basic sentence structure. There's a baseline of knowledge that anyone ordinarily skilled in the art needs to have, and trivial operations on sequences of values is without question one of them.

> Perhaps people get stressed in interviews?

Like I said, "Of course I recognize that some people may have been severely impacted by the technical interview process to the point that they were intellectually paralyzed."

> I'm not sure I could remember off the top of my head if the function signature

That would be a terrible question. Of course I wouldn't ask that.

Fair enough, I missed that while skimming your comment, and if you agree that would be a terrible question, then I generally agree with your sentiment.

What's the difference between a competent threat, and an incompetent threat?