I really think that all technical interview questions should be "open-book". Whether that's doing a homework assignment or simply telling the candidate what technical issues to study up on for the whiteboard.

For the brief stint that I did interviewing, I had candidates whiteboard after doing a homework assignment, but all I had them do was step through the very algorithm they had implemented in the homework using a very simple input dataset. None of them had any issues with the whiteboard, even those who were clearly very nervous/anxious.

Building software is hard enough as it is. I doubt making the coding tasks open book is probably not going to allow in many (if any) unqualified candidates.

Why not go all the way and make it “open internet”? Literally googling stuff takes up a substantial portion of any software engineer’s day. I would seriously doubt anyone who says otherwise.

I agree, though in context I assumed that using the internet was implied by my statement.

Name and shame. This is disgusting.

Bearing in mind we're only hearing one side of the story, of course

Assuming, in good faith, that the poster is telling the truth, either the company lied and the homework project wasn’t that good, or they were more interested in whiteboard hazing and the project didn’t mean very much. What’s more like real software engineering: writing code on the spot, on a whiteboard, in front of people; or writing code at home, which you can then have a conversation about? A sane hiring process would put more weight on one than the other, and this company obviously wasn’t sane.

I won’t name but it wasn’t shameful. They ended up looking for someone with experience more balanced between web services and embedded devices, and my background was very focused on embedded. Had they gone purely by the homework, they might not have gotten the best candidate.

May be an NDA issue

What kind of NDA prohibits mentioning the company name and the fact that no offer was extended?

Shitty ones that many devs might sign anyway (i'll admit to not thoroughly reading the NDA's i've signed when interviewing at big companies)

+1 Hear, hear!

I had much the same experience earlier this year, probably with a different company. I think that maybe interview processes are sometimes created via a tug of war between different groups, and to function at all, the people who will be working with a new hire have to have a veto at the end. So you may start out talking to senior people elsewhere that are paddling the boat in a completely different direction.