C# Word Permuter-Shifter

On April 23rd I had a job phone interview. The talk was about a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) position at Microsoft.

I already blogged about a C# Thread Safe Circular Queue, which was one of the questions of a screen test (prior to a phone interview) I completed on January for the same Microsoft job position.

On this last interview we (me and the Microsoft employee-interviewer) would talk a little bit and then get to the coding questions. It didn't happen as expected. Firstly the Microsoft interviewer tried to call me on my cellphone. I just couldn't hear a word of what he was saying. The sound was very low. Then we decided to start with the coding questions and then on the phone land line we would talk so that he could explain more about the position, etc.

We started a meeting on Microsoft Office Live Meeting. I was asked about a simple and easy question.

The question:

Write a program that changes the position of the words of a given sentence. For example, given the sentence "How are you going" as input, the output should be "are How going you".

Simple, isn't it? I thought that too at the moment.

As you can see, the first and second words change of position and then the third and forth words change of position and so forth.

The interviewer explained that I could write any code. It didn't need to be written with the syntax of a programming language, it could be a pseudocode.

I'm so used to code using code auto-completion (IntelliSense) and the debugger that I just didn't write any good code to solve the question. It was really frustrating. All what I needed to do was clear in my mind but I just couldn't express it. Was that the case of me being nervous? Beats me.

Today I decided about writing a post with a possible solution to this simple programming question. I opened Microsoft Visual Studio C# Express and wrote some code. In just 5 minutes I had a working code that did the job.

There are things in life that are really weird. I passed more than 45 minutes trying to write a pseudocode and then with the help of IntelliSense and debugger catching my mistakes, things flowed flawlessly and rapidly. Why that faster? I don't know how to explain it, maybe because of IntelliSense and the presence of a handy debugger!

For sure the solution I present here isn't the better, but it's a solution and that's what was asked.

Bellow is the code I wrote:

namespace WordPermuter
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      List<string> sentences = new List<string>()
      {
        { "How are you going my dear?" }, // are How going you dear? my

        { "I am going fine honey." } // am I fine going honey
      };

      DoPermutation(sentences);
    }

    static void DoPermutation(List<string> sentences)
    {
      foreach(string sentence in sentences)
      {
        // Split the sentence when it reaches a white space
        var splitted = sentence.Split(' ');

        // Increment the counter on a scale of 2
        for(int i = 0; i < splitted.Length; i = i + 2)
        {
          if(i < splitted.Length - 1)
          {
            var aux = splitted[i];

            splitted[i] = splitted[i + 1];

            splitted[i + 1] = aux;
          }
        }

        foreach(var str in splitted)
          Console.Write(str + " ");

        Console.WriteLine();
      }
    }
  }
}

What's the purpose of this code? Aha... It isn't the code itself but what approach you took to get to a solution. The interviewer wants to see how is your thinking process. No matter if you coded it wrong, but at least you should show something. As the recruiters always say: "Think it loud so that we can help you."

After a solution has been presented, the interviewer will probably ask you what if questions. What if I did this way? What If I did that way? What is the breach? What are the possible bugs?... The list of possible questions is innumerable.

I think my solution is OK! If you find any bug, please tell me.