We ask you to code a simple task that you should be able to do in your favorite programming language.
Not entirely sure how the discussion of coding interviews veered towards obscure knowledge interviews - the former was expressly designed to supersede and eliminate the latter as one of its core goals!
Likewise, many interview programming tasks can be are ones a competent programmer should be able to do with the tools of the trade accessible (namely Google and time to think).
Some simply are not. I was once expected to write, debug, and modify a concurrent chat server in an hour long interview. I do think that’s a reasonable programming task, but not one to be completed in an hour, under scrutiny. It’s the equivalent of being asked to rebuild a motor in an interview : definitely doable under real world conditions, but not a realistic test to determine whether to hire someone.
The job was for working on bare metal provisioning using yaml and Python, but I could 'use your favorite programming language'.
Before you think this was some third-rate body snatcher, it's a more well-known name that you've heard of.
They still ghosted me, after telling me what an 'amazing' job I did.
It’s centered around solving a reasonably common place problem, and doesn’t require anything fancy to solve. It’s more of a test in how they programmatically solve problems over anything else. If somebody struggles with it, then they haven’t been bamboozled by some acedemic algorithm problem, they’ve just shown that they’re not going to be able to write clean code unsupervised.
The opposite, shown they can’t write supervised under the gun, which never happens On the job.
