[th0raway]

My current company has a very similar interview style, and I later learned that I was pretty close to not being hired because I didn't do quite as well as one interviewer wanted on a coding challenge: I ran out of time. But what I also learned is that the interviewer had never solved the problem in the language I used!

I had one of our most senior engineers, who has worked in this language's compiler, to try to solve the exercise. Instead of 40 minutes, it took him three hours!

If a candidate is going to interview in a language, for the love of god, have as a prereq that the interviewer is actually capable of doing the exercise in that language.