Small software company in the UK. I was interviewing for a junior programmer position (no devs back then). There was a short technical test first - done in the

Small software company in the UK. I was interviewing for a junior programmer position (no devs back then). There was a short technical test first - done in the company's office rather than at home. A small project set up that accepted an input string, and I had to write the code to count the number of words in the string. Most applicants failed. This was followed by a harmless chat type of interview. In retrospect, I can see that the chat was to see how we got along - the small coding test was the 'is he capable' part of the interview. This was 1998. I didn't encounter the online test nonsense until 2021 in Dublin. Not Leetcode, but 100 gotcha questions in a row.