To be fair - we don't look for syntactic correctness of your solution. Hey, that's great. But the thing is, you never know what you're going to get. Some int

To be fair - we don't look for syntactic correctness of your solution. Hey, that's great. But the thing is, you never know what you're going to get. Some interviewers absolutely do insist on 100% syntactical correctness (along with optimal performance on some made up combinatorial problem) -- even though they aren't giving you a shell or IDE to run your code iteratively. Sometimes they won't even give you a decent text editor -- though it may sound ridiculous, it's become very common, of late, for interviewers to ask you to just type directly into a Google Doc -- with variable-width fonts, autocapitalization and other helpful features enabled by default -- even at places where you'd think they really, really ought to know better. It also make it a point to mute my phone and not to talk unless asked to. Again, it sounds like you're hip as to the basics of how these sessions should be run, and that's great. Unfortunately, it's not generally so, out there. Quite a few interviewers seem oblivious to the basics of phone etiquette (using speakerphones with an obvious echo behind them, for example). Or just aren't particularly communicative for one reason or another. And sometimes it turns out the person you're talking to doesn't really know the language you're coding in -- so you have to burn precious minutes explaining the basics of the language to them, along with the solution you're presenting. That's the fun part about these sessions. You just never know what you're going to get!