You know... I once had an experience like this when asked to do a trivial task (on paper) as part of a screening process. The interviewer didn't want pseudo-cod

You know... I once had an experience like this when asked to do a trivial task (on paper) as part of a screening process. The interviewer didn't want pseudo-code but said any language would be fine. They wanted to know how I'd store a list of numbers and return the max. I asked about the data structure several times as I thought they were looking for a generalizable solution that could be used with arbitrary objects and wanted to know if I had to define a separate class to implement a linked list or if I could just use a vector. This made the interviewer increasingly flustered because from his perspective the data storage architecture didn't matter and the answer was simple. I later found out he simply wanted to track the largest item on insert with a separate int and return that on max() - this was their concept of a good programmer, despite the fact it would be unnecessary and inefficient in any ordered list). After a few minutes he concluded I couldn't program and moved to end the interview. I decided that if communication problems were this bad (probably my fault as well), this wouldn't be a good place to work. And I was also sort of shocked he hadn't bothered to vet any of the public coding work I'd done. Who brings people into interviews totally blind? So while I might have been sympathetic to this article before, I wouldn't be so quick to blame the programmers. I was irritated this company had wasted my time, and probably vice versa. I don't know what the solution is for employers, but the solution for job-seekers is to require people to look at code you've produced before you meet them in person, and bring a laptop so you don't need to stare dumbly at paper while you try to remember the exact way to initialize a vector of pointers in C++. Either that or do a phone interview first to get this stuff out of the way.