Generic Software Engineer

Socrata is a Data Experience company. If you really like building beautiful, effective user experiences and are excited by a product that is used by many different personas, you should talk to us. We host a lot of important data and want to build the best ways for people to interact with that data.

This position is based in our office in Seattle, WA.

If you have the drive and experience to succeed at Socrata, email your resume. While we’re reviewing your resume, start thinking about our programming challenge below. We’ll ask you to submit a solution to it before coming in for a full interview with us.

Programming Challenge

Allow the user to enter two times of the format “[H]H:MM AM”. Mentally picture these times on two analog clocks, each having an hour hand and a minute hand. Without using any built-in date or time routines, calculate the number of degrees the minute hand on the first clock must travel in order to have the second clock show the exact same time as the first clock. Assume that when you move the minute hand, the hour hand moves automatically. The minute hand may only move in the clockwise direction. You may assume that the minute hand always ends up on a perfect minute boundary.

As example solutions, if the two times entered are “10:15 AM” and “12:45 PM” the minute hand must travel 900 degrees (2.5 rotations). If the two times entered are “10:00 PM and 9:00 PM” the minute hand must travel 8,280 degrees (23 rotations).

Solve the problem in any language you like, but write professional quality code as if you were going to check this in to the master branch at Socrata. Your solution to the coding challenge is part of the interview process, designed to give you an opportunity to do your best work without time constraint and with all your tools at your disposal.