I guess as a programmer I'm too logical. You tell me X hours, that's all I'm going to spend. For one of my past interviews I was given a task to make a multiplayer battleship game using whatever I wanted, and was told to spend 2 hours total and they didn't expect me to finish.

I got some rudimentary client/server communication going and that was it. No game logic at all.

Didn't get the job: "However, we would have liked to have seen you get further on the project in the same amount of time."

It was such a short timespan that I assumed it was a trick question, and they wanted to see if I could come up with a creative solution that technically met the requirements but was extremely simple. I implemented a board which you could put pins on, and a text-based chat system using websockets. The idea was that it would work like a table-top simulator.

Nope, turns out they wanted a real solution. I wonder how many companies who use these examples actually attempt them before using them to hire people. My guess is they might be more realistic if they did.

Oops, 2 hours.

I often give companies a list of open current open source tasks I'm working on. Pick one and I'll complete it for your interview. Every singe company turned me down, except one, who just accepted one of the tools I had on Github and examined that.

The startup sounded interesting, and I might have been prepared to spend the recommended 5 hours on the code test, had I had a chance to actually go into the office and meet the team...!

At least at the end of a Google interview you get to work for Google.

I eventually made the dashboard but it took 16 man hours; on the on-site, the interviewers implied they didn’t like it as it was not feature complete. (I called them out about the BI tool; they weren’t happy about it but admitted I was correct that it would be more efficient)

Now that I have had more experience as a data scientist, the real-world response to such a framing is to push back against the PM and write an implementation spec with a defined scope.

0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

I did an interview and one guy just didn't want to be doing interviews it seemed. Later when I was asking questions it became clear that he was a "senior dev" who just didn't want to talk / work with anyone he deemed less knowledgeable or just not capable or something. I also find out he's the lead for the spot they're hiring... bad feelings started for me.

Later I got some positive feedback that the take home assignment I completed was one of the only fully completed and "thoughtfully done" assignments they received (one of the only times I received useful feedback during a recruiting experience).

Bad vibes aside, I was a noob and beggars can't be choosers so I was surprised when they asked for a second interview and felt I had to go to the interview (need a job!). Second interview and it was the same thing, and when I asked questions he didn't even answer them really / his random technical statements seemed like sort of ultra truisms / not related to the actual problem we were working. It also seemed this dude's team kinda worked on their own island (kinda appealing) and he was the guy running the island evaluating people (very much not appealing). More bad vibes....

It was a big corporate place (good pay, benefits I had heard) so that meant, MORE interviews if we were going to move forward..

But by that time I had a good interview at a small place (less benefits, probabbly less pay, fewer people to learn from / with, long commute, but it seemed friendlier and the lay of the land was way more clear)... I decided that I just had too bad a vibe from the guy who would be my boss so I declined the interview.

I was pretty honest with the HR person that just from the interview this guy really seemed like he didn't want to hire me / didn't really want to work with anyone like me and if they were going to hire someone they might want to work on that. The HR person said "yeah we know".

I still wonder what that job would have been like, would have been really nice to work at that place...but that guy... you just get that sense in an interview sometimes.

And they are all, all, "fixing their Jira workflows". Constantly. What a time-sink of a tool, as commonly used. I'm convinced at this point they'd be better off letting their dev teams use whatever, and just have human-driven processes for collecting all the (mostly meaningless) metrics they always seem to need to report upward, rather than trying to make one tool do everything automatically. Pretty sure Jira and other heavy PM tools are typically the sort of software/process that Graeber calls out in Bullshit Jobs: adding a ton of work out of proportion with any real benefit, to make everything fit in a computer and on a spreadsheet, rather than reducing work.

We do pay a good rate for the time we instruct people to spend on the coding test. We value our people and prefer starting the relationship generously and in good faith.

The good part is that it was the last step, and 50% of the people from the last step were given an offer, so it wasn't that bad (though I'm afraid that the offer itself was maybe too low compared to my previous works).

So I suppose if you're honest about it, and you give a fair estimate of the time required, then what's the problem?

We're not evaluating them on whether they got the same answer as us. We care about hearing aloud their thought processes.

Means a lot of letters from kids get read only by the secretary till the identify it and destroyed.

You can learn a lot about a company's pain points by the questions they ask during the interview...chances are they're problems they're struggling with at the moment.

For a long time I thought it was perhaps due to poor sync with the Mac, since sometimes I manage reminders from there, but the same thing happens with the wife's phone and she doesn't sync Reminders. She has a single daily reminder at 10pm. Sometimes it shows up 4 times. Sometimes 4 times and 1 disappears for a net of 3 reminders. Sometimes just 1 shows up. Sometimes none of them show up. It's bizarre.

I've stopped thinking about it as "glitchy" and more "the new Apple way".

Perhaps you should try logging off and logging in again.

I totally agree.

He let me reschedule for later that day but seemed hostile and grumpy throughout the whole thing. Didn't get the next round.

Ironically enough I just moved to another iOS job and have been sitting in VS for the better part of the last couple of days. Some shared systems are written in C# so all developers basically have to use it at some points.

I agree it shouldn't be a part of the interview though.