If you're a world champion, you would probably enjoy an exercise like this.
This lady pilot sure did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KiC03_wVjc
That said, if a person is being considered for a coding job, wouldn't that person want to demonstrate their coding abilities? I mean, assuming they're actually good at coding?
In interviews, I much prefer a concrete problem to an abstract one, and coding problems are typically far more concrete than most other subjects covered in SW dev interviews.
You may usually write code in a terminal based programmer's editor (vim, emacs, ...) and realise the code you've just written is not quite right. You want to delete the last two words. There's even a default and handy keybinding for doing that.
So you press ^W twice.
If you are gonna require a candidate to write compilable code at least use one of the many tools designed explicitly for coding interviews.
I think I’d rather use straight notepad than google docs.
Like thats how I would feel writing code into freakin google docs during a job interview...with Google.
Tie 1 arm behind by back as the synax goes wonky, I'm fighting the spacing, etc. etc.
Or put mario Andretti into a ford focus, then test his lap times, with 0 warning.
Yuck.