[thaumasiotes]

I recently interviewed with a company that had advertised (in my paraphrase) "we've noticed that a lot of perfectly good developers do poorly in interviews for reasons that appear to be unrelated to job performance. So you can now interview with us by completing a project on your own time, and during the interview we'll talk about that".

My project was a regex matcher. I ended up getting the following feedback:

> We thought you wrote a great, very full featured regular expression matcher. It was especially impressive how much you dug into the academics behind regular languages.

> However we made the decision because we felt that while going through the project together during the interview, we didn't see the fluency of programming when adding to it that we had hoped for. While we specifically designed the take home project track to help overcome the difficulties of coding under time pressure with someone watching, we do still need to see a certain level of programming during the interview. This didn't seem to be the case here.

It's hard to know what to do with that. :/

[1stranger]

Wow, that really sucks. So they basically took the old process and just added more to it.

[sokoloff]

Disagree (on the second part). Rather than giving you the equivalent of a walk-up pop quiz on a random topic, they are giving you followup questions and discussions on code that the candidate wrote recently.

That seems quite a bit more representative of regular work than a pop quiz. Yes, you still need to be able to talk live about code with other developers. That's unchanged and shouldn't change, IMO.

[plonh]

Look like either bad communications or some sort of discrimination about your in person appearance, or they filled the open headcount with someone they liked better.

[robodale]

Wow, what the f_ck kind of person do they want? You showed when you can code, build a complex application that actually does something valuable. You know, understand, and can use deeper level stuff.

I get that they and every other business wants to find a team of wunderkinds that can plug right into their repo and get to work. That's the ideal.

My advice - don't sweat it.