Thank you, your second paragraph is exactly my point, and I didn't appreciate everybody else dressing it down in isolation. Of course I don't want to work with a bunch of robots. But there's a time and place, and please don't throw a wrench in the interview process to prove how smart you are: I want to work with people who pursue their initiatives tactfully.

I think you'd find more tact with a less combative-sounding opener than "If you take this approach, you'd better be a programming god, because you're going to be the guy who was too good to knock out a simple coding problem."

Moving the bit about the scope of the role (jr vs sr vs lead) up to preface the rest of the comment would've toned it down a bit, but even there I disagree with the "taking a risk" part - a senior candidate shouldn't feel like it's risky to offer alternative perspectives. If I got the impression that the hiring manager thought asking questions would likely be a sign of "cannot focus on the task at hand," that's going to set off my own flags a bit.

If you're married to your interview process I'm worried you'd be even more married to your day-to-day process, and I haven't met a perfect company yet, so I consider being overly adherent to process instead of results a warning sign.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a reasonable approach would be to give the interviewer the benefit of the doubt and to at least engage the programming challenge, and to also voice your concern with the process. It's no different from voicing your concerns first and grudgingly engaging the problem, but the two make wildly different impressions.

Also, as an interviewee, you stand to learn a lot more from that interaction than by rejecting it. Hell, I welcome coding challenges as an opportunity to size up the interviewer's chops!

If the challenge is conducted in a reasonable way, it should feel like any other design/pair programming session you've had at the office, and it can be quite revealing of the tendencies of your potential colleagues.

  > Also, as an interviewee, you stand to learn a lot more
  > from that interaction than by rejecting it.

If you already learned this is not the company you want to work for there is no need to waste your time playing stupid games just to win stupid prizes.

The chances of you learning that information via interview are minimal. Some of the best teams I've worked in have had the most dysfunctional interview processes - often for the reason I mentioned in my post - lots of growth, little time.