These are the absolute worst.
You're taking people out of their comfort zone (highly customized IDE like JetBrains / VSCode / Vim) which cause them to lose shortcuts and decently working intellisense. Yes, my TypeScript in my projects is configured in such a way that I get way more information from the compiler than the standard config. After all, you're testing my ability as a software engineer, not a code monkey, right?
In this very uncomfortable place there is no way of asking questions. Yes, sometimes stuff is ambiguous. I rather have someone who asks questions vs someone who guesses and gets it right.
The testing setup is horrible too. No feedback as to what part of the tests fail, just... fail.
No debugger. No way of adding log messages. When was the last time you've been in that situation at your workplace?
All under the pressure of time, and additional stress from the person that they really NEED a new job.
Oh, and when you use compiled languages, they're way slower than say TypeScript due to the compilation phase.
And then even when your score (comprised of x passed tests and y failed tests) is of passing grade there is a manager out there looking at how many times someone tabbed outside of the window/tab?
Where am I supposed to look up stuff? Do you know all of this information by heart: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.BTreeMap.ht...
Which reminded me that one time I used a function recently stabilized, but the Rust version used was about 8 versions behind. With that slow compilation cycle.
/sigh.
Everyone says this over the years, even before AI, and I've never felt it made the slightest difference in how they rate me.
It usually starts with them breathlessly reading from a script out of the corner of their eye. I'm ok with notes to make sure you hit some high points about yourself even in person. Nervousness shouldn't disqualify a talented person. But with the coding part I've gotten exasperated and started asking these senior candidates to share their screen and do a fizz buzz exercise live in a text editor. If they struggle I politely end the interview on the 15.
One candidate used some cheating technique to do the exercise which was interesting to watch. In the time I sent the message in Zoom chat and them sharing their screen, a few seconds, they had either queried it, LLM-ed it, used voice to LLM it by reading the question out loud, had someone off screen or in the same room listening in sharing the answer on another monitor I don't know. Whatever it was they turned their slightly to the side, squinted and typed the answer in Java. When asked what modulo was they didn't know and couldn't make any changes to it. It was wacky.
I'm waiting for the candidate who has someone behind them with the same shirt on pretending to be their arms.