In one of my first ever interviews, during the regular questions and discussion, the interviewer would randomly ask math questions ("What is the cube root of 27?" sticks in my mind as one of them). They were completely unrelated to anything else happening in the interview and they were deliberate interruptions, usually while I was answering a previous question.

https://hachyderm.io/@sara/112117125241735836

On a Google job interview I was asked to type in Google Docs! In comparison, interviews for hardware design were way better

Perhaps the interview was not about how well you can code and use your editor, well? Once upon time there was this coding dojo app that on purpose provided a very limited editor so that you would focus on other things that mattered. (If course, I am biased here 😹 )

On a related note, I have also done coding during an interview (I wouldn’t exactly call it a coding interview though) in G. Docs. I missed auto-indentation, but given that I anyway coded in pseudo-code, I don’t think any IDE would have helped me.

We had an architect who'd ask questions quite conversationally, then zoom in on a subject iteratively, ending up in "alright, can you write that out for me? Even in pseudo code" Done very smoothly

We managed to maintain relatively high standards at Bell Labs with absolutely none of this bullshit. The interview process was to talk about past projects at increasing levels of detail until it was either obvious they knew what they were doing or obvious they didn’t. One of the things that irritates me about most of these hiring practices is that they filter on criteria with little predictive value for future candidate performance, while also being psychologically painful for shy and/or easily flustered people, or those whose neurodivergence leads them to require certain tooling, &c. (And people of this latter category are often superb programmers when allowed to do it their way.) See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AoCK5r2TWg

Right, I've also struggled with the problem of filtering out shy/... people. Thanks for sharing!

I'm a big fan of the "tell me what things you've worked on before" approach. That and finding out what people are good at/excited about/both. That way even if they aren't right for what I need atm, I'll know in the future what kind of thing they might be right for (or suggest them to someone else who might be hiring), but that might be b/c of the various small business/start up scenes I've been in

I have a problem coming at it from the other direction - neurodivergent people can make for astounding developers and HR landmines. The corporate world is sadly Ill equipped to deal with nails sticking out

Different source of corpo nonsense one has to deal with in hiring

I also let the people talk about their past projects. Then I ask them, what was the most interesting project of them. After that I ask about the architecture, design and implementation of that project. If someone cannot answer my questions on his/her most interesting project, that's a clear sign of lack of interest and/or know how.