[drakonka]

I did a live coding interview a while back where I was sharing my screen. I just pointed out that I'd been testing Copilot and offered to disable it in my IDE. The engineer just waved it off and said I should keep it on. Trying to hide it didn't even cross my mind - either they want to see how I work in a realistic environment with available tooling or they want to see what I can do in a "blind" setup. The company's approach here is actually a potentially good piece of information for the candidate's evaluation of the company as well. Either way, doesn't seem like something worth hiding.

[KronisLV]

> Trying to hide it didn't even cross my mind - either they want to see how I work in a realistic environment with available tooling or they want to see what I can do in a "blind" setup.

Honestly, the realistic style of work that's close to how one would actually approach problems in their day to day is pretty much ideal. In my case that would be using a nice IDE, some AI as a glorified autocomplete, IntelliSense and all that as well, in addition to Googling stuff along the way, if needed.

That should be enough to let them know both how I think, as well as show how I can solve problems and reason about those solutions. Heck, maybe even give me a simple task to build a CRUD and then talk about the choices I've made, if they're serious about hiring me and want to actually see what's inside of my brain.

But of course, in many places can't have that happen - they want to put the candidates in a situation where they just have a barebones text editor and expect them to produce good results. Blergh.

[sensanaty]

I had an interview recently where the interviewer asked me, and I quote, "Please solve this using whatever language/editor/tools you're comfortable with and what you'd use in your day-to-day work"

So I pull out trusty old Ruby + RubyMine, and the question (I don't remember what it was specifically, but it was some sort of array manipulation type of thing) was trivially solvable with some Ruby STD lib method. Apparently he wasn't satisfied with the answer despite his prior instructions, and me not knowing what the actual method code is was reason enough to disqualify me from the job, which I found baffling.

I got into a bit of a heated discussion that, if I were solving a problem at work, there's a 99% chance I'd just reach for this method that Ruby itself comes with, because why the fuck would I try be a smartass and reinvent stuff here? And if for whatever insane reason I did indeed need a bespoke solution, I'd just poke around the source code and extrapolate from there, which he still didn't consider a good answer.

These interviewers drive me insane sometimes...

[bluefirebrand]

I've had this happen to me in an interview before, from the other side.

I laughed that I had given them such an easy problem for their chosen language, then said "ok, pretend you went back in time and you're the person writing that function for the std lib" and so they did.

It probably wasn't as optimized as the actual stdlib function but it was good enough for the interview.

I gotta say if someone got heated with me about that request I'd end the interview early and not give them the job too.

The point isn't just providing a solution it's demonstrating that you can work through a simple problem. If you get heated about that during an interview then I don't get any info about your ability to work through problems, and I do get the impression that you're short tempered when asked to do things you don't care about.

[MaxikCZ]

Not OP but I dont think they got heated because they were asked to reason/invent stdlib function, it seems they got heated because they got disqualified for using stdlib function without knowing the exact algo the function uses beforehand.

[lazide]

Like dating, rarely do people want what they say they want. Not because they’re lying to you either, but because they’re lying to themselves.

[theamk]

Back before COVID, we were performing in-person interviews, and one of the steps was a debugging problem. We always told people in advance that they can either bring their own laptop configured the way they like (we gave details about languages/libraries required), or they can use one we provide.

I was surprised to see how many people would prefer our laptop during interview instead of having their own favorite environment.

[MaxikCZ]

I would be interested why that is, have you asked?

[kadoban]

I would 100% pick the company laptop. I don't like installing random crap on my own machines, which there'd be no non-awkward way to avoid otherwise.