I applied through an employee referral. The process took 5 days.

I interviewed for a software engineering role. They say they want to steer away from brain teasers, which already is a red flag to me since that implies that they believe they have a better way to assess candidates. Anywho, the challenge is to implement something in React with their given criteria. The idea is to simulate a real working environment. Welp, this of course doesn't work, because in a real environment you don't get penalized when you find you took the wrong turn in an implementation choice. In the real world, you simply revert your changes and restart where things were working.

But in the interview, you must know the perfect path to implementation in one go. In short, be prepared to read the interviewer's mind and get the most optimal implementation from him within the time constraint and while he is watching you code. If you don't implement it in the way they expect, you are out. Well, so much for improving the traditional brain teaser questions.

While brain teasers are not perfect, they are still around because they avoid exactly this issue: the issue that the passing or failing of a candidate is not depended solely on the opinion of the interviewer, rather there is a clear score that puts a number on the candidate. The score certainly does not gauge the candidate's competency fully, but at least it's a game with clear boundaries.

Implement a 3x3 captcha validator in ReactJS.