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Re:“This project will only take 2 hours” by wongarsu on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @06:46AM (#29173626)
"here's a computer, please implement a function in $languageOnYouCV that receives two words and returns true if they are anagrams of each other, false otherwise, if time permits add some unit tests" seems to fulfill that need just as well, and should be quick enough that being in the room or not is more about what makes the candidate more comfortable and gives the most insight for the interviewer.
Re:“This project will only take 2 hours” by sdiupIGPWEfh on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @08:02AM (#29174185)
That sort of problem is about the right level of complexity for a candidate to show they can think about a problem, provide an implementation, and discuss alternatives. Something they should be able to do without ever studying or grinding LeetCode.

However, there's always room for the interviewer to muck things up.

For the anagram problem, there are a range of solutions, including elegant & inefficient, clever & efficient, and robust & efficient. Do you dock someone depending on which they reach for first?

There's limited time, and a candidate may assume you're mostly interested in "how they think" and thus focus on the algorithm alone. After the interview, do you run the candidate's solution against test cases that you never mentioned, docking them for "missing" matters of casing or non-alphabetic characters? If the candidate themselves wrote unit tests, do you dock them for missing test cases you felt should have been included?

Do you dock them for not checking for invalid inputs, even though the candidate might normally work in a type checked variant of the language that wouldn't have permitted that anyway?

So many possible hidden assumptions. I know I've been rejected for similar unstated expectations in the past, and in retrospect, I know I've been guilty of doing the same to others.

Re:“This project will only take 2 hours” by htrp on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @10:37AM (#29175788)
At that point it's not a coding exercise, it's a full blown case study.

This isn't a programming contest and your company isn't ACM

Re:“This project will only take 2 hours” by sethammons on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @08:01AM (#29174172)
That is where we interviewed as an industry 10 years ago. Then people noticed a few holes (what, they don't know fundamental $x!?) and those were filled. List vs map, complexity, tests, trees and traversal, http api stuffs, unixy things, and then into networking fundamentals, distributed systems stuff, etc.

10 years ago, nearly no candidate pulled a distributed queue solution in a design interview and now it is a standard answer in their pocket.

Re:“This project will only take 2 hours” by easymodex on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @08:49AM (#29174575)
Is the candidate allowed to use google?

Just asking since it's a very easy task but I'd wanna doublecheck how to reverse a string in that language.

Re:“This project will only take 2 hours” by noisy_boy on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @12:32PM (#29177444)
anagram, not palindrome.