> land a job within a year of actively seeking

A year lead time is what a negative rate looks like?

As to your other comment, have you considered people who have mental illnesses/disorders? Their lifestyle (in every sense of the word) would not permit a romantic relationship, too bad they can't just "find another one".

If you're hiring a point guard, isn't testing their reflexes by tossing them a basketball a reasonable approach?

A genuine interviewer (and I realize several/many may not be genuine) is solely trying to figure out if the candidate has these types of reasoning skills.

Let me phrase it this way: By asking a common CS question, you'll get people who simply memorize answers/algorithms. By asking something obscure that is rarely known, you can try to get a glimpse into someone's thought process, which is infinitely more valuable than rote memorization.

That's what I was looking for as a hiring manager.

Unless you've been in the shoes of a hiring manager, I'm unsure as to where this idea is coming from?

Having been a hiring manager, it is a horrible experience. Unless it's extremely naive, homework sets generally take time to come up with and formalize, and certainly take time to review the results for.

I suppose I can understand conflating the motivations of an interviewer with their employer, but it's not generally true to say that interviewers are just trying to exploit those they interview.

Furthermore, however, how would you design a Content Delivery system that was performant that also had the level of security/privacy that you'd consider appropriate? keep in mind that cookie/session based security requires extra network traffic and coordination, whereas a simple GET request is pretty simple.

Considering the massive amount of traffic they deal with (nearly 1B people, right?), I think their use of UUID type strings (though I don't think they're specifically UUIDs) is pretty appropriate.

I guess let me ask it this way: what threat do you feel they've left you open to?

I'm continually annoyed that I actually have to say "autism spectrum disorder" to describe MYSELF, lest I be called politically incorrect.

Many just want to live a normal life, and having other people (with no vested interest whatsoever) rushing to our "defense", is quite honestly more condescending than OP's original comment.

For example, I set up the project for my team in 7 different languages (Ruby, C, Python, Perl, C++, Java, Go), with the appropriate project structure, etc, for each. This took considerable work on my part, but the end result is that I can judge the output based on whatever the candidate is most comfortable in.

Granted, that's all assuming my skills in each language doesn't completely suck (hopefully).

CoC (Convention Over Configuration) solves most of the problem for you, since it's basically CRUD, and that is boilerplate stuff in pretty much any language.

Also, where's your citation/article/anything that you can't get Make without installing XCode?

Citations for any of these? I have 'make' installed on my mbp without XCode (along with clang, etc), and I use my mbp with 2 24" monitors all the time (in clamshell mode), and it's no less sharp than it is with a desktop.

Secondly, there are very few intersecting character classes (sets) that I'm aware of, and in all cases, you could achieve the desired result more clearly in other ways.

Said another way: "AND" would just make regexes even harder to understand/approach, and that is almost always undesirable.

A lot of people I think take the approach of "well, I exercised, so I can afford to eat this cheesecake", or something like that.

I took it as: "ugh, I hated that workout, so I had better not eat this cheesecake"

I think the biggest battle is mental, and not so much physical.