[GVIrish]

Say what you will about the guy's tone (impressions may vary), but I don't think the guy was being unreasonable about the heart of the matter.

> Secondly, the fact he refuses to pair program with a developer on the existing code base ' to see how he works within a team / on code - suggests that he probably would equally be unlikely to do anything outside of what he is technically being paid for.

I don't think that is the case at all, the guy offered to do some work on some open source code and the interviewer refused. It's not that he wasn't willing to pair program, he was unwilling to produce a day's worth of deployable code for free.

Programming is skilled labor, and doing skilled labor for free for a commercial interest devalues the profession. It's one thing for there to be occassional spikes in working hours, it's another thing to start out a relationship with the attitude of, 'You will do work that is valuable to me, but you will only get the chance of working for me in return'. That's what clueless people looking for programmers on Craigslist do.

Flip the situation around. Let's say the interviewee asked the company to provide a developer to spend a day developing an open source feature so he[the interviewee] could see the company's coding practices in action. What company would agree to that? Especially for multiple interviewees?