THE BEST ENGINEERING INTERVIEW QUESTION I’VE EVER GOTTEN

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

This blog post discusses a programming challenge from a software engineering interview. memcached, an in-memory key-value store, provides a built-in way to atomically add k to a number, but it doesn’t provide other arithmetic operations - there is no 'atomic multiply by k' operation. The challenge required interviewees to add a `mult` command to memcached. The challenge is well calibrated for interviews as there is only one correct answer and it is also a good representation of what most real-world programming is like.