I had an interview recently where the interviewer asked me, and I quote, "Please solve this using whatever language/editor/tools you're comfortable with and what you'd use in your day-to-day work"

So I pull out trusty old Ruby + RubyMine, and the question (I don't remember what it was specifically, but it was some sort of array manipulation type of thing) was trivially solvable with some Ruby STD lib method. Apparently he wasn't satisfied with the answer despite his prior instructions, and me not knowing what the actual method code is was reason enough to disqualify me from the job, which I found baffling.

I got into a bit of a heated discussion that, if I were solving a problem at work, there's a 99% chance I'd just reach for this method that Ruby itself comes with, because why the fuck would I try be a smartass and reinvent stuff here? And if for whatever insane reason I did indeed need a bespoke solution, I'd just poke around the source code and extrapolate from there, which he still didn't consider a good answer.

These interviewers drive me insane sometimes...

Back before COVID, we were performing in-person interviews, and one of the steps was a debugging problem. We always told people in advance that they can either bring their own laptop configured the way they like (we gave details about languages/libraries required), or they can use one we provide.

I was surprised to see how many people would prefer our laptop during interview instead of having their own favorite environment.