What fresh hell is this?
Apparently one of the New! features that some high-tech companies have started to use on interviews is that rather than shipping a prospective employee up to the company for a face to face interview they’ll phone them up and have them do coding on some sort of whiteboard website software.
There’s just something about trying to listen to an interviewer’s questions over a poor telephone connection (I’d jacked the volume up so far on my phone so that I could hear my voice booming back at me, but the interviewer still sounded like this when he talked,) then putting the phone down and trying to write some code to solve a problem the interviewer asked about, only to then pick the phone up again and discover that well,I actually wanted you to do this other thing.
Which I then had to spend a few minutes asking the interviewer just what they meant, because they actually wanted me to do this other thing that was intuitively obvious so why even bother to explain it to me.
I lasted about 45 minutes before blood started coming out of my ears and I (hopefully politely) told the interviewer that I was not the person they were looking for and they should consider someone else for this unnamed position they were interviewing me for.
This wasn’t as bad as the G**gl* interview where the interviewer cheerily told me that the screening interview was a lie and it was an all p*th*n all the time job, but it was pretty damned close.