I'm sure I personally have failed programming tests by doing too much (or not enough) "enterprise" programming in particular stuff that requires things like par

I'm sure I personally have failed programming tests by doing too much (or not enough) "enterprise" programming in particular stuff that requires things like parsing a CSV file. Do you use a third party library, roll your own, just use string.split(",")? All three are good responses, personally unless the sample data has embedded quotes I've just added comments saying that I'd use a particular library[1] for this normally but I've used string.split as a quick and dirty hack. At work we've stopped doing take away tests in part for just this reason. We do have a small pair programming test (fix some SOLID code smells in a small 10 line program) and we also don't expect folks to fix all of the problems within that code. As a pair programming exercise you can almost walk someone through the first problem with the code (there are two big problems[2] plus four minor issues that you could find) and also you can guide the scale of the response they have to the issues (For example I might prompt them and say if you use mocking frameworks in your current job lets use that and you can talk me through how to use it) We've had pretty good success with this and does seem to avoid some of talks a good talk but can't do developers. [1] Getting the library onto the interviewers machine might be a really big issue their firewall might block access / maybe I can't send binaries to you due to your AV [2] Since it's only 10 lines of code the issues are the sort of thing in the "real" world you might ignore but repeated across a code base would be a problem.