Heh, I'd accept it. In screening I used to ask them to implement an isOdd() function for an unsigned int, and after they did it (never had someone fail) see if they could come up with alternate ways. Mainly to see if they're aware of bitwise operators, though it's nice to see they can write loops too. It wasn't a fatal flaw if they weren't (it would be if they couldn't solve it in any way), but knowing is better than not knowing. Anyway one person who didn't know nevertheless amused me by doing a conversion to string and checking the last digit.
After years of asking the same questions to intern candidates and to senior+ candidates, interns did consistently better. There are a lot of "experienced" but not very skilled people out there. They exist already inside ompanies too (Principle level checking in hundreds of lines of code with many classes and tests, purportedly to add logging support to something, but the code was ultimately a NOP as it did nothing) but even if it's impossible to put out the tire fire it's best not to contribute to it.
After years of asking the same questions to intern candidates and to senior+ candidates, interns did consistently better. There are a lot of "experienced" but not very skilled people out there. They exist already inside ompanies too (Principle level checking in hundreds of lines of code with many classes and tests, purportedly to add logging support to something, but the code was ultimately a NOP as it did nothing) but even if it's impossible to put out the tire fire it's best not to contribute to it.