My own story is somewhat similar - the coding problem was a Tetris style game that was bounded and easily achievable in an hour. No graphics, just console text.

My own story is somewhat similar - the coding problem was a Tetris style game that was bounded and easily achievable in an hour. No graphics, just console text. Even though the job would be JavaScript and my expertise was C++, I chose to use Python (and I have no idea why anyone would choose a language other than Python for a time-constrained interview, given the choice. ;)) Move or rotate a block, and drop it until it rests on the pile. The main requirement was to implement a scoring routine, and then “extra credit” was offered if someone wanted to implement an AI if they had any remaining free time. I was so excited to get the thing working and flex by writing a basic AI player that I completely forgot to write the required scoring routine (my AI heuristics maybe should have, but didn’t depend on score). The interviewer was kind and just asked me to explain how I would have written the scoring routine, and then later offered me the job. I took it. (It was lower pay than my previous job, but not egregious. No regrets though.) This interview is for me, like you, one of my favorite interviews ever. BTW I completely bombed the MVC database schema portion of the interview. Like really totally bombed it, I was terrible. But they were reasonable and everything else was fun. Six months later I was giving all the same interview questions and hiring people, trying as hard as I could to make the interviews as much fun as I’d had.