I would agree. I recently went through a phone interview with $BIG_COMPANY. I'm not actively looking for a job, but the opportunity was interesting (I'd be able

I would agree. I recently went through a phone interview with $BIG_COMPANY. I'm not actively looking for a job, but the opportunity was interesting (I'd be able to learn some things that aren't possible at the small companies I've worked at for the last decade). I had explained to the recruiter that I had spent the last several years programming almost exclusively in C on embedded systems. The call (~45 minutes) was spent doing a programming exercise involving string manipulation where the interviewer was essentially silent, while I dealt with the details of getting string manipulation on C correct (the actual problem was trivial from an algorithm standpoint, and could be banged out in python or a similar language in ~10 minutes with access to a REPL to check the details). I wasn't about to try to remember the proper syntax for another language on the fly (especially since the interviewer didn't want me to use anything other than a shared text buffer during the interview), and didn't have the prototypes for various string-related functions memorized, so I'd bet I came across as incompetent in the reviewers eyes. Never mind the fact that they could have asked interesting questions about how I wrote a rather complex piece of an IP stack from scratch recently, and successfully deployed it to various customers. I suppose if you have a big enough candidate pool and a reasonable compensation package, you'll find someone acceptable with this approach - but you'll spend a lot of interviewer-hours doing it. To be honest, I don't have anything against them, but I'm unlikely to accept another interview if their recruiters call again.