the state of benchmarking by normal IT people is tragic. If one checks out his 'optimization problem statement' article [1] they can find:
>ASCII: it’s okay to only support ASCII
>Threading: it should run in a single thread on a single machine
>Stdlib: only use the language’s standard library functions.
This is truly 1978 all over again. No flame graphs, no hardware counters, no bottleneck analysis. Using these 'optimizations' for job interviews is questionable at best.