Raw LLM Responses

Implementing tic tac toe seems like a bad example since I think that's a little too complex for an in-person interview, but you would be absolutely shocked at how many "prescreened" candidates we get claiming 5-10 years experience who can't code even the most basic things. I feel compelled to share 2 real world examples from about 2 years ago: We interviewed a guy who claimed 10+ years of Java experience. We asked him to code a simple problem: write a function that takes a list of integers and returns the sum of all the positive ones. We could've forgiven a few bugs like using >= instead of >, but this guy straight up couldn't write a for loop. This guy was ”screened" by both the recruiting company and our own internal team. I don't care how anxious you get during interviews, with a problem that easy if you can't come up something even resembling a solution, you can't code. We interviewed another candidate around the same time who seemed to talk the talk and the interview was going well, but as soon as we mentioned we were going to ask him to code he said "I'm sorry but I'm not willing to do a coding portion" and hung up (this was a remote interview) without even hearing what we were going to have him code. Now I'm not going to advocate for interviews with complex algorithmic problems, but I feel like expecting a no-code interview is just too much. I'm a software engineer and after sitting in on the final round of several interviews for my team I don't think I'd want to work for a company that doesn't require at least some coding as part of the interview process, because it would be hell to have to work with people like that first guy, or honestly probably that second guy either