[lostcolony]

My favorite interview, ever, was a phone screen. Untimed. They gave me a weekend to solve two not really difficult problems, with well defined interfaces. The catch was to write it in a production ready style. That is, do everything I would do for actual production code. Documentation, test suites, write the code to be as elegant as possible, while failing as cleanly as possible if invariants failed.

I have no idea their results with that, and I ended up taking a job before the in person interview, but I enjoyed the screener a lot.

[greyskull]

I'd probably fail that from lack of experience, but it does seem to be a great approach for someone a bit more seasoned. That shows a lot more about someone's software engineering capabilities than short tricky problems.

[walshemj]

Some one more seasoned would not work for free at a weekend.

[lostcolony]

Some one more seasoned would not work for free during a weekday.

See, I can play that game too.

Besides, this was a contrived problem. If you want to say "I refuse to solve any coding problems while interviewing for a software position", then fair enough. Good luck finding one. I think this was a total of perhaps 3 hours of my time, and was good enough to get an onsite? And it was time I -enjoyed-. Unlike most phone screens, timed interviews, etc.

[seanflyon]

I think the grandparent is reacting to "Untimed. They gave me a weekend" which made it sound as if the interview took all weekend which a more seasoned programmer would be less likely to do.

[walshemj]

And in a lot of cases in Anglo Saxon employment law working for some one else with out authorisation is a breech of employment law.

It was the they wanted production ready code that set alarm bells ringing.