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Facebook Programming Puzzles – A Boatload of Fun?

March 30, 2007 | 1 Minute Read

primebits.gif

So I was browsing Facebook, my second favorite social network (my most favorite being Notecentric, of course). Unbeknownst to most, Facebook has a bunch of random pages linked to from their footer. There’s a pretty cool developer blog, and other random junk. I was looking at the jobs section (I need something to do this Summer) and I came across a section called “Puzzles.”

There’s just a bunch of programming puzzles. Some are harder than others. As in programming wise and computationally too. The Prime Bits problem seemed pretty easy (as in, doable in about an hour) so I did it. I guess I’ll just send it to Facebook and tell them that I’m looking for a Summer internship or something.

The only thing is, it seems like the puzzle is too easy. What if they use this puzzle as some kind of red herring to capture lazy programmers in order to blacklist them? Or maybe there’s a way to be clever that I didn’t think of? I’ll probably send it anyway. It only took me like an hour. It’s probably mostly just to see what peoples’ programming styles are like (OOP, functional, etc.).

What’s the point of my post? I dunno, but Facebook seems like a pretty fun place to work for if they just randomly post programming puzzles for people to solve.