My employer is hiring software engineers, a DevOps engineers, maybe some other technical/programming roles, too. I’m on the mailing list that sees all the job applications (and I field the math applications), so I’ve seen a bunch of the applications for the software positions come in.

With the full-time math positions, we ask the candidates to send in some fairly standard stuff, and if the candidate looks promising, we send a math/writing test. We use this to decide whether to schedule an on-site interview.

It looks like with the new ad for the developer jobs, we’re putting one of the preliminary coding tasks in the job ad.

Due to my liberal arts education, I know what some of the “right” ways are to approach this coding task. I can think of a few very harmonious ways to organize the information needed to solve the problem. There are some data structures that are so appropriate for this task that you would hardly need to write any comments because anyone who has taken a data structures and algorithms class would immediately see where things are going. Based on what I know about the nature of the position (which is described pretty clearly in the ad as well), I also know which programming languages would allow a candidate to showcase their strengths.

I am seriously considering coming up with the trolliest of troll solutions to this problem. This morning in the shower I came up with a data structure that works but is not what you would expect. I also thought of a way to traverse it that is remarkably opaque. My algorithm relies on a lot of integer division, modular arithmetic, and bitwise AND.

And I’m thinking of writing it as a bash script. If you don’t know bash scripting, then there is no way that you would understand what this code is doing. It’s just going to be a confusing jumble of symbology.