I just went through a small exercise with a company ... we did an hour screensharing on coderpad. basic exercise was in php (mix of systems, but there's existi

I just went through a small exercise with a company ... we did an hour screensharing on coderpad. basic exercise was in php (mix of systems, but there's existing php to touch). financial service industry, and they'd mocked up a rough idea of a typical problem. The example code clearly wasn't production, and was generic, but also illustrated the problem domain well enough for them to get an idea of how well I could adapt. I got through the 'nut' of the problem in about 10-15 minutes, talking through some issues. One thing I'd ignored (and said I'd be ignoring) was date handling - they wanted some date sorting thing, but since this was just 'raw' code without any good helper libraries, I suggested we punt on that (and I named the libraries I'd typically use for date handling). There was one spot where the interviewer suggested the ?? 'newer' null coalescing, where I'd been looking at doing some 'array_key_exists' checking. he'd suggested that the ?? syntax was easier and more compact, and I'd countered with I'd prefer to be more explicit about the specific keys I wanted to check for, and that ideally I'd be using a class or some other more defined structure to ensure some degree of valid data shape as a first level of sanity checking. I'd felt I may have pushed back a bit hard on that point, but, we moved on. After the first 15 min or so, we'd spent another 15-20 talking about different ways to do other types of error handling, some potential performance issues, etc. High level stuff, mainly, which... there's only so much you can do with coderpad (my jetbrains and vim muscle memory did me no good in the browser!) All in all, though, I'd felt it was a decent exchange. They were able to show a 'real' problem without relying on any proprietary stuff, it was difficult enough that someone junior probably would have struggled a bit more, the guy on the other end was pleasant, and engaged appropriately (responded to questions and casual banter, and interjected now and then to ask questions and give feedback in real time). It was probably one of the better 'tech interviews' I've had (although I haven't had many in recent years, so, hard to compare). It did seem better than many I read about, and certainly better than some from 10-15 years ago.