I was approached by Google through their foobar challenge. I thoroughly enjoyed working through the levels of the challenge (I got through level 4) and actually learned a few things in the process. But everything after that was pretty terrible.

First, through all of the exercises in the challenge, I had already provided them several hundred lines of code that I had written specifically for Google. But then they still wanted me to do a phone interview with a virtual 'whiteboarding' session. Which basically amounts to writing code in a Google Doc. This is something I have never done, and never will do in any real-life situation.

I have written code almost every working day for the past 20 years, in a variety of different languages. I have designed and led teams building web applications with dozens of classes and thousands of lines of code. But I have never written code in a word processor program. So in the phone interview, I was pretty slow, and due to that slowness, the interviewer concluded that I did not know how to implement a fairly simple Java class. It was a demeaning experience and a complete waste of my time.

Implement a Java class that reads a log file from a web application. The log contained data about how users interacted with a specific feature in the application. The task was to build a method that collected some simple statistics on that data.