While looking for a job recently, companies did their best to evaluate me through code challenges. Most of these challenges I did fairly well at, but there was one that nailed me. This challenge asked the coder to implement several functions in Python. Then, it asked the coder to optimize the algorithms by taking advantage of system threads. Lastly, they asked for an explanation as to why the threaded implementation was faster. However, the multi-threaded code I wrote ran slower than the single threaded version. Far slower. Almost an order of magnitude slower.

Somehow, I didn’t that job. The cool thing is that I still have the offensive code, and I’ll analyze that code here. I will also attempt to solve the same problem again with my findings, and will post that code as well. This may take me the duration of 2011 to get to this, but I want to conquer the hardest pure coding problem anyone has ever asked this QA engineer to do.

However, If you’re reading this and have just realized that it is 2013, and there are no other posts, I’m sorry that I never got to it. :-)