dcplogic
Their business idea was to handle calls that were placed in inconvenient hours, relative to Swedish business hours.
My best guess is that the Thai ISP this office used filtered all outgoing connections except port 80 and 443.
And then someone decided that the way to implement this securely while still allowing this office to access the data was to put a plain HTTP server on port 443. "Who is ever going to crack that?"
So, as a courtesy we figured, why not spend a few hours extra with this applicant in the programming test. We set up a laptop with a clean Ubuntu install, devised a programming test that was quite involved. Not algorithmic hard, just more complex than what can normally be done within a 20-minute whiteboard interview. We expected it to take at least 2-3 hours. Google/Stack overflow/etc access was allowed and encouraged. "Just act as like you would normally do when solving a problem."
We spent like 2x4 hours devising this problem, based on our codebase (cutting out something somewhat easily digestible and making it able to run standalone).
It took like one hour to get productive. Explaining the problem, setting up editors, compilers, etc.
We took turns, but most of the time someone in the interview team (of two) sat next to the guy. We did give him some alone time.
This is probably nothing new in terms of interviewing techniques, but to us it was such a revelation. We learned so much more about the applicant. Perhaps it worked well with this guy because he happened to be a bit more outgoing than our typical successful applicant. We'd never felt so confident about giving someone an offer before.
I'm really looking forward towards testing out this approach with local candidates to see if we can replicate this "data gathering success".