The questions I got were very specific to playing card patterns. The one I remember best was "How many times does it take to perfectly cut and shuffle a deck of

The questions I got were very specific to playing card patterns. The one I remember best was "How many times does it take to perfectly cut and shuffle a deck of cards before it is back in original order". Spoiler: A "perfect" shuffle is called a Faro shuffle and the holy grail of false shuffles to master as a magician. When a deck is cut evenly at 26 cards (doable with practice or a slightly bent or irregular marker card) and Faro shuffled correctly eight times, the deck will return to its original order. If I really liked the company I might indulge your question, but it would annoy me unless you were a game development company and this was a real problem someone faced recently. I general I don't like live coding questions because they don't reveal anywhere near the quality of work I produce if left alone to think for a bit. If the questions pertain to a real world problem I will noamally indulge them though. As an interviewer I don't make people do them. I often do live code -review- to see if people can understand code and spot security flaws or bugs as I find that a more useful skill than coding anyway, and code review -is- something actually often done together with peers in the real world. I sometimes ask for people do take-home tests if they have no open source projects I can reference, because seeing how people code on their own is how I find out if they can do the job. If they use search engines to help, I don't care. That is how real life works. That said, I only do this if I know the employer is willing to pay them for the time. Work simulation goes both ways. If I am going to make it like real work, I need to pay for it like real work.