> Also, I declined to mention this in the article, but after I finished that UTF encoding problem in my interview, the interviewer asked where I got the check-bit macro (he saw me paste it in). I told him I got it from StackOverflow. It didn't seem to concern him.
That's a pretty important part of the story, and makes the situation very different. It also makes the interviewer seem a lot more competent. Trivia questions are useless in interviews, and the fact that you were able to quickly google it, recognize it as a relevant solution, and apply it correctly actually is demonstrating that you know how to learn things quickly (and that you have at least some familiarity with binary representations and manipulations). The average charlatan would just start copying and pasting in panic, which is usually pretty easy to pick up on.
Meanwhile, you can't pretend what you described in your post is really a moral position if you had not said anything. It might not have been strictly immoral as you really owe them nothing, but there's no shining principle demonstrated there.
That's a pretty important part of the story, and makes the situation very different. It also makes the interviewer seem a lot more competent. Trivia questions are useless in interviews, and the fact that you were able to quickly google it, recognize it as a relevant solution, and apply it correctly actually is demonstrating that you know how to learn things quickly (and that you have at least some familiarity with binary representations and manipulations). The average charlatan would just start copying and pasting in panic, which is usually pretty easy to pick up on.
Meanwhile, you can't pretend what you described in your post is really a moral position if you had not said anything. It might not have been strictly immoral as you really owe them nothing, but there's no shining principle demonstrated there.