What would you recommend to someone who don't own a laptop capable of acting as a development machine?
Or what if you're allowed to use your laptop, but aren't allowed network access to reference Google, SO, or even documentation?
Or what if you're allowed to use your laptop, but aren't allowed network access to reference Google, SO, or even documentation?
For example, I used to give a question where the solution was literally: take two pairs of numbers, find their differences, add the differences together. (The problem involves computing the difference between two times represented in an unusual format.) A candidate who is unable to take the differences of two pairs of numbers and add them together is going to be unsuccessful -- and I have had candidates show up in my office claiming to be "9 out of 10" C++ programmers who could not write correct code that added and subtracted four numbers. The vast majority of programmers will solve the problem correctly, and that is step one; I want to know how are you going to test it, can you prove that it is correct, if the times were in different time zones how would you change the signature of the method, should the method return an error for invalid inputs... I want to know if the candidate can actually reason about code.
If you want to be a developer, buy one. While building very large projects on low-end devices is still problematic, almost any laptop today can be used for basic development tasks.
Twenty year ago, this was an important question. Today it's much less important, because machines are very cheap, relative to developer salaries. If you can't, well, it's the whiteboard for you then.
"Or what if you're allowed to use your laptop, but aren't allowed network access to reference Google, SO, or even documentation?"
This would fall under "if this concerns you, fix it then". Granted you can't get arbitrary SO searches, but almost everything has offline/local docs. I prefer them anyhow; the web's latency has not gotten better anywhere near as fast as it should be.