[thezoid]

Let's throw you into a high stress environment give you data you've never worked with before and on top of that, just for funzies throw some namespaced SOAP at you. Oh and here's the WSDL, we want you to use that too, no parsing it on your own by hand.

A lot of people don't parse XML as much anymore. Most API providers have moved over serving up JSON and pretty much ask developers to only use that API.

Also this company fucked up. So you can't provide access to an API, but here read this RSS feed instead of something like serving up a static JSON file from a server somewhere.

As for the regex there's shipping, and there's doing it right. For all we know, they had to have it done before the 2 hours were up so they cut corners and got it done within the time requirement.

[ricardobeat]

Reading a XML feed instead of JSON is not comparable in difficulty to your examples at all. Getting XML parsed is not rocket science, just use a library. That was probably not the hardest part of the problem.

We have no idea where the expectation of working with their JSON API on the interview came from, the RSS feed could be their standard test problem. They didn't "fuck up", I'd even say their filter (reasonable or not) is working as intended.

[thezoid]

I'd say it depends. There's lots of things that can really throw people through a loop. Maybe you are using an editor they aren't familiar with, or perhaps you don't have your environment setup for gradle projects. There's so much more to this that we don't know. I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

A way to get around excuses like these are to encourage people to bring in their own systems. Explain that you know how your setup might be awkward and it's probably better if they work on something they are familiar with. Besides, during the pairing session, you shouldn't be writing too much anyway.