Companies that plan on doing something like this: please make sure you are paying your candidates market wage for the interview.
For Leetcode style questions, there is some amount of interaction from the interviewer, so the cost to the company is that employee's 1 hour wage. If as a company, you feel like this is an efficient and superior way of interviewing, consider giving that amount to the candidate.
This question is asked over an interview (I’ve personally faced this question) and the company isn’t deriving any more value out of asking this question as opposed to a Leetcode-style question, so I disagree.
For OP he said it was three hours after the context was given. I guess it depends, this is personal to me but I'm bowing out of most processes that I deem to be meaningless/a waste of everyones time.
Then of course, the natural conclusion is that some portion of potential candidates would always be dissatisfied with the interview process and question set, which maybe explains the persistence of Leetcode-style interviews with all that entails.
For a “first level” interview the time demand is probably unreasonable.
But if you’re already shortlisted, I don’t feel it’s an unreasonable amount of time for a relatively basic assessment like this before they commit to paying you a significant amount of money by employing you.
That implies that their assessment of their hiring process is not in fact incorrect, broken.
Companies (as in its employees esp managers, processes, culture) do things that are not at all efficient, correct, in the best interest of the company all the time. Not to break out into another discussion - but the resent push to force employees back to the office could be seen as one such example.
> If companies thought they were missing out on too many good people they wouldn't do it.
that doesn't reflect my experience at all.
from the outside many weird things seem to have some deeper meaning and thought-out plan. But when you get an inside-perspective, you notice that often no meaning or plan exists, and the reason for the weird thing is something silly like "an important person made a suggestion, that someone else misunderstood, but also made it a priority", or "there was a good suggestion, but it wasn't implemented, because the person who suggested it, was in bad standing with the management".
Or maybe candidates should submit their answer as a PR to memcached. The interviewer is deriving some value from an open source project, they should contribute to it.
I feel like that could very quickly devolve into a Hacktoberfest spam situation where the memcached maintainers keep having to close unsolicited "add a multiply command" PRs. The feature used in the question was designed to be easy to understand and implement, not actually useful to anyone.
> make sure you are paying your candidates market wage for the interview
I always wondered how workable that could be at any scale. We sometimes hear about company straight contracting small fixes to a candidate and use that experience to decide on hiring.
But most job interviews I've ever received where while being in a full time exclusive contract with my actual employer, and I wouldn't quit before getting the next job. Doing some coding interview on the side is of course fine, but the moment money gets into the mix, I feel it becomes a weird line to walk on whether I'm breaking my exclusive contract or not.
This line being iffier if I'm getting paid by a competitor in the field for the interview.
For Leetcode style questions, there is some amount of interaction from the interviewer, so the cost to the company is that employee's 1 hour wage. If as a company, you feel like this is an efficient and superior way of interviewing, consider giving that amount to the candidate.