A long time ago, I interviewed with a major bank. As part of an all day grilling (arrive in city at 1 am, interviews start at 7:30 am, last until 6:30 pm with a lunch break), after lunch, I was given a programming task. By that time, I had already been interviewed by three people. The task was something that may have sounded trivial at first blush. I was given a computer and an hour.<p>After the hour was up, my code was reviewed by six people while I interviewed with the DBA who took joy in pointing out my admitted deficiencies with SQL. I then had another hour discussing the code with the six reviewers.<p>The program worked on the sample data I was given. I was later told that the other candidate&#x27;s programs also worked on the sample data. Except, mine was the only one which actually ran to completion with their real data sets. I was also the only interviewee without a formal CS &quot;education&quot;.<p>I got an offer which I ended up not taking due to location considerations.<p>If you are going to ask someone to write code, give them a computer and some quiet time. You can grill them about the thinking process <i>after</i> they came up with something. Having someone watch over one&#x27;s shoulder every time one puts a pen to the stupid whiteboard will eliminate a lot more candidates for the wrong reasons than one ought to consider desirable.