> I interviewed one individual who couldn’t even get the REPL started for their project and as they were struggling trying to get it to work I heard them mumble

> I interviewed one individual who couldn’t even get the REPL started for their project and as they were struggling trying to get it to work I heard them mumble to themself “I should have just use my work computer”. The fact they couldn’t get the most basic aspect of the project to work on their personal meant that they did their coding assignment on their work computer I've been a candidate who "couldn't even get the most basic aspect of the project to work". I had been working for years at a company that most developers in the world would sacrifice their firstborn to have a shot at being hired, and I've been using their work laptop for years on end. I considered switching gigs, I answered a recruiter's call, and I found myself in a technical interview using one of my own laptops. Only during the interview did it dawned upon me that my personal laptop had no development tools installed. Why? Because I never used it for work. Worse, I was used to my employer's automated process to setup software development environments, so I had no assurance that I could setup a fully working dev environments in 5 or 10 minutes, let alone the meeting's full hour. If you want to run Python as a REPL on Windows, good luck. Thankfully my meeting ended up using a webapp to do the pair programming/coding challenge, but if I had to run code on my personal computer I would have to spend far more time setting it up than testing stuff, reschedule the meeting, or simply bail out. Some companies allocate more than a day to get new candidates to set up a working dev environment and building a project, while assigning an experienced dev to guide them. I know that because I've onboarded half a dozen people and that's what it usually takes. I'm reading your comment and I'm surprised you didn't noticed how your account does more to document how oblivious you and your team were to critical failures in your hiring process than in assessing the competence of a candidate. How many times per day do you need to setup a software dev environment? Is this how your company gets paid? Is that where you needed additional people to work on? No? Then why on earth are you evaluating them in a completely irrelevant domain? Don't you have people in your team who can spare some minutes documenting and automating that process? By the way, following that interciew I was extended an offer for a senior position. If the recruiter was like you and I would have been evaluated on my ability to setup a working software dev environment in the allotted time, I'm sure I would have spent over half the meeting googling for where to download the interpreter and how to set it up.