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Google used to ask people to write code in a Google doc. No tools allowed.

Facebook to this day disables intellisense in their coderpad interviews.

It's fucked up.

It'd be like interviewing a chef and you give them twigs and a flint rock to roll their own stove.

I don't get what these tests are trying to show.

Breadth? Depth? There's other ways. Give some complicated code that touches a bunch of things and have them work with that.

From my interview at facebook some four years ago, I am inclined to believe they disable intelisense so the candidates do not get tangled up in the minutiae of language syntax, function arguments, etc. and instead focus on the algorithm they are trying to write.

Except you get dinged on your performance if your code doesn't run once the interviewer has a chance to test it after the interview. And getting dinged generally means rejection in today's economy.

I passed that round and I’m 100% sure the code I wrote was not runnable as it was written.

I actually got a google doc interview where they asked me to code up a hyperparamater optimizer from scratch. I couldn’t believe that they asked me to code in a google doc. I should have stopped the interview right there.

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