I applied through a recruiter.

There was an initial call and then a "pair" programming round. I put "pair" in quotes because it really isn't paired programming. Instead, the engineer just sits there giving little bits of input every now and then. Personally, I absolutely hate doing technical programming interviews like this. I've had too many bad experiences that have honestly put me off doing them. I don't understand why in our industry we have to have such complicated interview processes compared to others. I would've much preferred to do a take-home test if given the opportunity.

I was given only forty-five minutes to code up an in-memory ledger, so I was obviously put on the spot to solve a problem. The interviewer fed back that the code was complicated and had a lot of repetition, but I wasn't really trying to solve a beautiful code challenge. Reviewing my code now, it only has two bits of repetition. I repeatedly said this wasn't ideal and that I would like to redo it, but given the limited amount of time, I had to focus on trying to make it feature-complete. As I progressed through the problem, I realised and communicated that my code wasn't ideal, but I couldn't exactly just go back and rewrite everything to make it better, which the interviewer even said not to bother with. So, to complain about my complicated and repeated code I feel is a bit cheeky and rude. I'd like to ask if they put their engineers under such time pressures to solve technical problems. If not, then why do it for interviews? Why is this an accepted way of interviewing for our industry?

Live coding a in-memory ledger.