I described it in my initial comment: "We prefer giving them problems like writing a text based guess the number game or tic tac toe. Mindless easy to solve pr

I described it in my initial comment: "We prefer giving them problems like writing a text based guess the number game or tic tac toe. Mindless easy to solve project." Language, Environment, etc doesn't matter. If you are interviewing people on that stuff then you aren't finding the best candidates. They get to choose everything outside of the problem to solve and it is an extremely dumbed down project like I said in the original comment. The "real world" part is in the implementation... How well is the code architected? Did they write tests? Are there performance issues? Bugs? We don't expect people to be perfect either, we learn more from the discussion afterwards, since its not a puzzling problem we get to focus on software design and not the problem itself, which we feel is more important.