[Yacoby]

Maybe they are a bad interviewer?

In my view, if the answer involves a topological sort the interviewer should know how to solve it and be able to follow and find errors in the candidates code. If the interviewer, knowing the answer, cannot find any issues then surely the code is fine (for code written in an interview)

[ellenhp]

It's also possible that she hadn't seen the particular algorithm used before, or that she was having an off day or stressing about a meeting immediately after the interview, or that there were errors that she did see and she didn't want to say "yeah there are errors here" because doing so could affect the candidate's confidence in the interviews after hers. I could imagine any of these being true. Or she could just be a bad interviewer.

[shuger]

That is irrelevant. Asking someone to type non trivial code outside of IDE and then expecting it to compile and run without issues is lunacy. Even junior programmers know this. The interviewer in this story was either an amateur, an idiot or on power trip.

[ellenhp]

I guess I'm also an idiot then, thanks, how kind of you to say that.

Actually hang on, I'm editing this to be slightly meaner. Your whole take that doing this is a sign that she's either an idiot or on a power trip is a very familiar thing that people say about women in tech and I'm honestly tired of it, because I can see myself doing exactly what she did and I don't like it when people say those things about me. Please don't do that.

[shuger]

Gender has nothing to do with this.

You just can't tell someone to type code into google docs and expect it to just work and worst off all judge a persons skill on this basis. It takes minimal experience of programming to learn this. Hence all the jokes that people are surprised/suspicious when their code runs after first compile.

If you disagree with this you could have provided any sort of counterargument. Instead you took this weird "women in tech" angle. Wrong is wrong, interview here was wrong, gender did not play a role.

[xenocratus]

If you can't assess someone on their response then you're not interviewing them, you're just giving an exam by proxy. But that might very well be because the whole recruitment process is thoroughly stupid.