When I was interviewing candidates at a company that didn't have a structured interviewing process, I used to ask people to write "the world's shittiest JSON encoder." What that is is a very limited JSON encoder that could handle strings, numbers, None, dicts, and arrays, without regard to performance, on their laptop or a loaner, with full access to the internet, and a pinky promise that the candidate wouldn't just look up "how to write JSON encoder," or anything similar.

I would give the problem in stages, starting with primitive types and working up to arrays and dicts. If we finished that, we could talk about other stuff, like how to write the world's shittiest JSON encoder, adding additional types, testing, and maybe a little optimization.

I thought it was a good problem, and we got a good candidate or 2 out of it through interview loops I participated in.

There were lots of twists and turns to the problem, but it wasn't some commonly asked question like LRU cache, and it didn't demand a lot of code.

I assume you wouldn't have classified me as a "hazer," right?