> The filter for this is a simple review exercise. We present a small chunk of code and ask them to review it over 15 minutes pointing out any issues they see. The idea is to respect their and our time. It works pretty well and we can determine how much experience someone has by their ability to pick up the obvious vs subtle bugs.
So maybe there's more? But it's definitely a mandatory, initial part of the interview process at the very least.
I've actually done an exercise like this about a year ago, in Java, I remember I really cared about iterators at the time, and so even though it's probably not the worst thing wrong with the code I just kept coming back to these C-style for loops which I thought were reprehensible. I should ask my interviewer (whose department I now work in) what their impression was as a result of this obsession.
You lose data due to overflows which is what we expect
Seems like a reasonable question, though without more context that may or may not be true.