'but I tend to think that problems like "Pascal's Triangle" don't represent what we work on day-to-day'
There are plenty of software jobs where that statement is absolutely true. I am not interviewing people for those jobs.
Taking a well-defined problem such as "write code to print the Nth row of pascal's triangle" is substantially easier than most of what we deal with on a day to day basis. The hard part is discovering and defining the problem well enough to get the point where it is as easy as "here is what we need to do, write some code to do it". Once you get there, whipping out the code needs to be second nature.
As cletus said in his post - a problem like this is a negative filter. If someone has a hard time whipping out the code for a well-defined problem like that, they will have a very hard time here.
If they can't, it doesn't mean they are a bad programmer. It doesn't mean they can't be successful in the industry.
It is simply a strong signal that they would not be successful at Google. And since I'm interviewing people for jobs at Google that's what I care about :-)
There are plenty of software jobs where that statement is absolutely true. I am not interviewing people for those jobs.
Taking a well-defined problem such as "write code to print the Nth row of pascal's triangle" is substantially easier than most of what we deal with on a day to day basis. The hard part is discovering and defining the problem well enough to get the point where it is as easy as "here is what we need to do, write some code to do it". Once you get there, whipping out the code needs to be second nature.
As cletus said in his post - a problem like this is a negative filter. If someone has a hard time whipping out the code for a well-defined problem like that, they will have a very hard time here.
If they can't, it doesn't mean they are a bad programmer. It doesn't mean they can't be successful in the industry.
It is simply a strong signal that they would not be successful at Google. And since I'm interviewing people for jobs at Google that's what I care about :-)