Nice!

On the array sort…that is clever but it doesn’t return those values to something you can use; it just sorts them on screen. I respect the cleverness, but yeah, not useful.

This is not the reason it isn't useful. The function could just as easily modify an array as print; you could also keep a list (or an atomic integer if that functionality is available) of which have been sorted and spin until it shows that every member has been sorted. Taking n milliseconds to sort an array whose highest element is n, with the cost of all of the thunks, plus the potential for a (very rare) race condition... not so great.

Regardless, I'd hire either of these programmers if there weren't red flags elsewhere.

For-loop even number guy can get lost

I don't get this. Who cares if they forgot or just didn't know the better solution? They were able to solve the problem under pressure, even if not in the most optimal way. They even remembered to handle the negative case, which is straight up a good sign (no pun intended). And while it's slow, it would honestly still be fine to use in production anywhere you'd use typescript, as long as it's not in a hot spot.

In my mind this tells me approximately as much about the programmer as if they wrote it using modulo.

I did a review of someone's code submission once where they pretty much wrote a bespoke JQuery implementation to handle the super-complex task of incrementing a number in a div when a button is pressed. I don't think they got the job. I felt a little bad for them, but a valid part of those coding interviews is "Will this person go off and do something crazy like write their own half-baked React instead of just using React?". Showing that you know how to write code as simply as possible is a big plus.

I have yet to administer or discuss interviews where using an api was an acceptable answer. Granted my experience is more on the engineering side but it seems odd to me to not expect someone to implement their own algorithm. If they had 60 seconds to answer a multiple choice technical question on a prescreen online test, maybe. But it seems that person demonstrated their understanding on a technical level that should have been expected and explored?

It doesn't, the array is still in the same order it started in, it's members are just printed to the console in numerical order.

It just prints the number 1 after 1 ms, 2 after 2 ms, 3 after 3 ms etc.

Because the abs(3) == 3 is true and that isn't even.

An even number of flips would be true and an odd number of flips would be false which works out.

I was thinking a bitwise & or converting it to a string and testing if the right most character is 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 would be panic mode solutions too.

Lol I think the interview pressure got to you.

I'm not following.
n == abs(n) only tells you if it's positive.

That would be isPositive.

Without using the modulo operator you'd essentially have to reimplement it. Divide the number by 2 and round down. Multiply that by 2 and then subtract it from the original number.

isEven(10) results in 10-10==0 (true) whereas isEven(13) results in 13-12==0 (false).

function isEven(n){
  n = Math.abs(n)
  return (n - (Math.floor(n/2) * 2)) == 0
}