Absolutely agreed. I start with a simple problem with several answers of varying difficulty and literally instruct the candidates to code the first correct sol

Absolutely agreed. I start with a simple problem with several answers of varying difficulty and literally instruct the candidates to code the first correct solution they can think of. Nested for loops, brute force, it’s absolutely fine. I just want to see you translate what’s in your head to code. I want to see you structure code, use data structures, etc. Then we will talk through optimizations, refactoring, testing, edge cases, etc later. You want even the under qualified candidates to feel like they got some pieces right and had a fair shot. As you start probing deeper, the top candidates stand out. They answer your questions about the differences between data structures, how you would test this piece, how you would monitor that piece in production, how you could parallelize it, etc.