As fate would have it, the [thing I just learned] happened to be an extremely elegant solution to the programming exercise for this interview.
And this is exactly the problem I’ve seen in interview after interview. If you just learned about/used the thing that is the perfect solution to the problem/question being stated, you look like a genius. I’ve had this happen to me recently where I clearly impressed folks, but I’m thinking to myself “if you asked me this a month ago, I’d be giving you a blank stare instead of an awesome answer.” And that depressed me.
After ~10 years of interviews, the single best predictor of a callback (for me) has been time of day.
I’ve tended to do 3-4 (once 7) interviews per day when I’m looking. Every single job interview I’ve been to after 3pm has resulted in an offer; very few of the ones earlier in the day have.
Not sure how much it’s a practice effect (I’ve been interviewing all day and I’m hitting my stride) and how much interviewers lean towards a positive review in the late afternoon.
What I can’t stand about code challenges is the lack of upside. For one company, a few years ago, I really worked to knock the code challenge out of the park. I probably put 10 hours into making that thing fast and accurate, and in the end… I got the same junior-level offer that I would have gotten anywhere else, at that age.
As the OP discusses, there’s downside in submitting code: they might be looking for a specific approach to the problem, or have stylistic prejudices, or just be in a bad mood when reading it. There are lots of additional risk variables that come into play. On the other hand, if you really nail it, you’re not suddenly going to be evaluated as Principal Engineer material, if you weren’t already seen in that light. So what’s the point?
My experience also is that there’s a negative correlation between the amount of work you have to do before an interview and the quality of the company. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but it seems to be true more often than not. And at one of the worst companies that I’ve seen, there was an ongoing language/platform war and whether a submission was accepted or rejected depended on whether the submitter’s choice of language matched the “side” of the code reader. Oddly enough, while that company used a code challenge, it was still notorious, in the NYC area, for the low skill level of its engineers.
That happened to me at the interview for my current job, in C/C++ what is the potential problem with this? void something(char a[10]); I only recognised the issue with the code because I had read it on Lobsters the week before (as my interviewer may have too?).