It was a really small startup where the CTO was one of the founders and had written the first version of everything. I don’t mean to belittle what he did, I have a lot of respect for people building thins from the ground up.

It was just a very odd episode and illustrative that you don’t always fail because you’re bad at coding.

I do have other things to do during the day :-)

Really, it isn’t meant to be. I’m Just trying to say it’s not always the candidate at fault.

This is one example from a great many interviews I’ve had in my time, most of which went much better.

What I’m about to say might come off as smug. I don’t mean it to be a flex, it’s just for context.

I’ve been programming since i was 6 years old, and have 26 years of continuous professional experience. 30 years of open source contributions. You are almost definitely interacting with code I wrote on a daily basis.

7 years ago I was caught up in a round of layoffs and I was scouting around for jobs. I got an interview at a startup - it wasn’t a huge tech challenge, but I needed a job.

I did an initial technical interview with the tech lead for the company. All went great. I did a “final HR interview” , again great. Then the CTO stepped in and said that he would need me to complete a coding test before I could be hired.

I failed that live coding test despite producing code that outperformed the code in the “correct” solution by several orders of magnitude.

The CTO was clearly upset by my solution, which he got very angry about and insisted was wrong, without explanation, and despite it beating the spec and passing all the predefined tests.

2 days later the tech lead, who was also present in the test, told me there was nothing wrong with my code. Better still they had actually taken it and put in into production in place of the code that CTO had written, and which was the basis of the “correct” solution.

He also told me that he’d quit after an argument with the CTO about this and asked if I found a good place to work, if I’d let him know.

Sometimes tests are not about what you can do, but how smart they make the person testing you look.