I had an interview like this recently. A &quot;live coding&quot; exercise after (in their words) two excellent phone screens.
The test was to implement a class which would be run through a bunch of unit tests. Simple right? It turned out to be a disaster.<p>First was the choice of language. They offered to take it in JS, Ruby, Python, or Java. I&#x27;m a .NET developer whose competent with JS, but I really could be better at it. I asked to take it in C# but they refused and said it&#x27;s not about specific language knowledge. So I did in in JS. I turned out to be almost completely about JS specifics and quirks. Because I&#x27;ve been learning JS recently, I&#x27;ve had the fortune of having to avoid the bad parts. When asked to recite them I struggled. This part is obviously my fault but if I had been allowed to perform in C#, I would have done a hell of a lot better.<p>Second was the environment. I have very limited exposure to programming on a Macbook and I spent the first few minutes struggling to translate all of my shortcuts. During a timed test it was pretty disheartening to not be able to type as fast as I could. I haven&#x27;t used Sublime before but the default theme was near unreadable and I was allowed to switch it after a few minutes. The third was the test framework. I really wasn&#x27;t familiar with how Jasmine worked in the browser, and it showed. Again, my fault. But taking 5 minutes to familiarize me with their setup would have made things go much, much better for me.<p>Before I get jumped on for blaming them for my poor performance, this was for a test automation role. I explicitly said that my JS&#x2F;Jasmine&#x2F;etc. skills were not that great and they still brought me on site.<p>Honestly, I would have preferred the whiteboard. Each test took up nearly the entire period, leaving very short time for talks about what I really care about - culture. I have a Github with a bunch of good projects. I&#x27;ve been employed as a developer for a while now. I can obviously program well. Drop the bullshit and lets talk.