This is a horrible interview process. I’m not even going to comment on the salary other than that company must be quite full of themselves to offer that low and give a stupid technical test that proves nothing.

Hazing-style technical tests are just dumb and this absolutely qualifies. On top of that, I hate technical interviews that tell you that you can’t search the internet or use toolsets that you would use daily in your job. Why do companies waste everyone’s time on exercises that are not representative of the work/working conditions?

When I ran a hiring round last year I spent a good chunk of time putting together a test/process that tried to closely mirror the type of code/problems you would be solving as an IC. I had almost every candidate (even the ones we passed on) commented on the process and how it was no-nonsense and letting them use whatever tool/resource/etc they wanted to solve it made it less stressful.

I even told people they were free to use LLM/AIs. After competing the base test (which they did without us watching, it’s an easy base problem) we asked candidates to modify the code to handle one more use-case (very simple, nothing like the silly rules the OP was given) and it was very clear which people understood the code they/the AI had written vs the ones that could prompt for a solution but didn’t understand it and thus failed to modify it to account for the new use-case (or struggled heavily for something that was a 1-3 line fix depending on how you implemented the original code).

I truly despise the hiring process from both sides. Both parties are asked to make life-altering decisions on very little data. We had a 4-step interview process:

* Introduction, ask basic questions, get to know you

* Technical test and problem solving test (the problem solving test was talking through a real issue we had run into, asking you to talk through possible ways to solve it. There is no "right" answer or rather there are multiple right answers)

* Debugging test, we produce code with bugs in it, you find/fix all the bugs

* Final interview with owners of the company

Last time I talked about this in HN I had at least 1 person complain about how long the process was. Normally we'd get through it in 2 weeks or less with a candidate (depending on scheduling) and it was a total of about 5-6hr (depending on how long the tests took). I'm not a fan of long and drawn out interview processes, but this was the bare minimum process I could come up with that would test candidates in the areas that we cared about. Also, I wanted to give ourselves multiple chances to interact with the interviewee as some people came across great in the first few rounds, and by the later rounds issues had started to surface.

Is 6hr really a crazy amount of time to spend deciding if you want to commit to 40hrs a week to a company for potentially years of your life? Yes, yes, yes, I know you can leave after a week if you are unhappy and I know the company can let you go after a week if they are unhappy but it's never that easy and switching jobs is hard/painful/stressful (as is firing someone). I am strong opposed to the "just hire them and fire them quickly if it doesn't work out", in fact I find it morally repugnant to play with people's lives in that way. Also, I assume the people who suggest such a corse of action are not the ones that have to onboard new hires (a process that is very involved and takes a lot of time, for me at least).

This was an interesting post for how to solve FizzBuzz in an unorthodox and just "cool" way but this test tells you nothing. In fact, if a developer wrote code trying to be this clever, I would reject it at PR time. It's cool for code-golfing but LoC is always a stupid measurement when it comes to maintainable code.

I wish the OP the best of luck finding a job that doesn't make them jump through hoops like this again.