The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother’s date of birth
– Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson

A question which I like to use when interviewing C++ programmers: what is the range of a 32-bit integer?

I don’t use this question very often anymore, or at least I don’t let it influence my decision very much (which is why I don’t mind spilling the beans here), because the correlation with other technical skills turns out to be not as strong as I thought it would be. Still, there are some interesting patterns in the kind of people who know the answer versus those who do not.

Among the people who do not know the answer, some of them react quite affronted that they would even be expected to. What is the point, they will ask, in having memorized some little piece of trivia which they could Google up in a few seconds? Isn’t “knowing where to find it” a much more useful skill? Ask me about architecture! Ask me about design patterns and data structures! All of these objections have some validity, and indeed we will certainly ask about those other things during the interview. Still, I believe that it is perfectly reasonable to expect a good developer to know the answer to the above question by heart.
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