With that approach, anyone who immediately switches to a programmer's editor to write the code and pastes it in when done (either manually or via something like It's All Text) will look identical to a candidate who searched for the answer and pasted it in. The former is a property you'd want to select for, while the latter is one you'd want to select against.
Yes. That's why i had a big fat warning telling them to not to this before they started the process :)
The page before they started basically told them everything we'd do. My line of thought was that anyone being able to bypass it is worth interviewing anyways.
I explicitiy told them that we'd log EVERYTHING and asked them to directly write the browser in the JS IDE (well, syntax highlight but no autocomplete) that'll come up, and that they shouldn't switch tabs or windows.
I still think this is fair, for litterally fizzbuzz, nothing similar or anything, just fizzbuzz.
I didn't care about (small) syntax/logic errors or anything (because you'd never run the code), but you wouldn't believe the amount of people unaware of the modulo operator.
Ah. If you're upfront about it, that's somewhat more reasonable. Though I'd still rather see more approaches that are tools-agnostic, and better approximations of real work.
Fair enough, I slightly amended my post, but I think asking for fizzbuzz with generic syntax highlighting is fair enough. As I think it's simple enough to write tool agnostic, because I'd expect you to be able to write it in any language you like, ignoring fatal syntax errors.
It's really just fizzbuzz, not an approximation of real life world, we had on site interviews for that (Switzerland is quite small, not sure how that'd apply to the US).
