Even knowing the “correct answer” to this riddle for as along as I remember, I don’t think it is right. For someone looking for how to handle this in an interview, I’d go with this:

I will fetch a friend or colleague to look at the bulb as I test the switches because:

• It is by far the most obvious solution that literally everyone faced with this problem actually would use. It is easy to understand and will be easy to explain to others (if you, e.g. need to present or document what you did).

• It is also a better solution: it is by far more robust against a large number of failure modes: e.g., if it turns out you are testing the wrong switch, the bulb is broken, more than one switch turn on the light, etc.

• It scales better: the same solution trivially extends to N number of lightbulbs controlled by M number of switches; and at large N it will save time not having to reach each bulb.

• It gives the opportunity to interact positively with a friend/coworker. Helping each other out with small necessary tasks builds team cohesion and work environment, and thus lowers the barrier for further collaboration, making us a more effective team in the longer run.

I’m in this meme, and I don’t like it.

On the topic of things to never forgive Redhat about, aren’t there other things that are more pressing? Like, inventing a whole scheme to circumvent the idea of the GPL license via service contract blackmail?

I couldn’t agree more. If there only was a somewhat user-friendly setting that allowed the oom killer to be far more aggressive, killing or freezing processes as soon as their memory use starts to affect system responsiveness, and just tell me this is what has happened.

ADA should be the lawful good.

Bash is chaotic neutral.

Java is lawful neutral.

Javascript fits ok as chaotic evil.

Move ASM to neutral evil.

And maybe f77 as lawful evil.