There's nothing I hate more than coding exercises in technical interviews, but the team wanted it, so there's a pretty simple one. I try to make as clear as pos

There's nothing I hate more than coding exercises in technical interviews, but the team wanted it, so there's a pretty simple one. I try to make as clear as possible in the preamble before we get to that part of the interview that I consider it to be a casual exercise, and have will offer to pair program with candidates who freeze up. I honestly don't care if they know the answer to some leetcode problem (also something I state in the preamble), I want to see how they break down a problem, and if they get stumped, how they work with other people on it. In the example I gave before, I had to explain to the candidate what the code they copy / pasted from the internet did. That might be fine for a junior candidate, but for someone with "10 years" of experience with the language, it's a non-starter for a senior programmer.