[usea]

People routinely overestimate how much can get done in 5 minutes. I ran a live coding challenge at our company's booth at a language conference. 5 simple problems, how many can you do in 5 minutes? We had a PC with IDE open and ready to go, function signatures pre-written with empty bodies, unit tests running to color an icon red/green next to your function. The first problem was return "hello world". They were things covered by the standard library like reverse a list, or filter, or map. Everybody thought it would be too easy.

Nobody could get more than 3 of them. Most people were shocked that 5 minutes was up already. My coworker who did interviews for our company was shaken that he had been judging applicants too harshly after he couldn't finish.

They were trivial problems. But 5 minutes is a very short amount of time.