When I found myself out of work last year, I interviewed for a big auto company - their interview process involved an online coding session. They gave me a spec for an assignment and asked me to complete it in 20 minutes - I could pick Java or Python. I picked Java, and got the spec - it was ridiculously simple. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was something like, "write a function that will print out the text value of a number in the range 0-4, given the numeric value (so if you got an argument of 3, you'd return 'THREE')". Well, in my haste to complete the assignment in the generous 20 minutes they gave me, I... didn't read the specification closely enough. I started writing a program that took in a _list_ of numbers on the command line and output their text values. It took about 10 minutes to code it and sanity test it - then I thought to double-check the description and, "shit, I misread it". So now, with 10 minutes remaining, I'm thinking, "if I change this to fit the description, they're going to see that it took me 15 minutes to come up with a pathetic function that should have taken me 2 minutes." So, I started refactoring the whole program to _contain_ the function that they asked for, but call it from a main routine that would parse the input, call the function, and write out the results. With 19 minutes on the clock, I submitted my abomination. The recruiter was kind enough to call me back and tell me that they had decided they had "better qualified candidates in the pipeline". Oh, well...
Probably the ones that read the spec and delivered what was required. If you're going to gloss over something trivial, what does that say about your attention to detail?
Alternatively, it's someone that wrote a solution, re-validated it against the spec, realized it was not fully correct, and was able to correct it within the deadline given. Hiring isn't yet a science.
When I found myself out of work last year, I interviewed for a big auto company - their interview process involved an online coding session. They gave me a spec for an assignment and asked me to complete it in 20 minutes - I could pick Java or Python. I picked Java, and got the spec - it was ridiculously simple. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was something like, "write a function that will print out the text value of a number in the range 0-4, given the numeric value (so if you got an argument of 3, you'd return 'THREE')". Well, in my haste to complete the assignment in the generous 20 minutes they gave me, I... didn't read the specification closely enough. I started writing a program that took in a _list_ of numbers on the command line and output their text values. It took about 10 minutes to code it and sanity test it - then I thought to double-check the description and, "shit, I misread it". So now, with 10 minutes remaining, I'm thinking, "if I change this to fit the description, they're going to see that it took me 15 minutes to come up with a pathetic function that should have taken me 2 minutes." So, I started refactoring the whole program to _contain_ the function that they asked for, but call it from a main routine that would parse the input, call the function, and write out the results. With 19 minutes on the clock, I submitted my abomination. The recruiter was kind enough to call me back and tell me that they had decided they had "better qualified candidates in the pipeline". Oh, well...