For me, a good interview is a dialogue where the company representative shows me as much about the company as I do about me as a candidate. Take-home tasks are okay, I guess, but I suspect they might balk at me requesting they handle a mock HR issue, or whatever, for me!

Yeah, that’s my reading as well.

If you’re optimizing that hard you should probably sort the data first anyway, but yeah, sometimes it’s absolutely called for. Not that I’ve actually needed that in my professional career, but then again I’ve never worked close enough to metal for it to actually matter.

That said, all of these are implemented as functions, so they’re already costing the function call anyway…

This is why I think school and interviews are like a whole different universe from the one where actual work gets done.