Lol "can i just convert it to a set".
I imagine someone felt really smart for finding that question and you just ruined their day.

Our interview process has the candidate implement a couple (extremely simplistic) API routes, with the specific approach left up to the candidate. It's more about having something they can talk through and evolve than it is about us looking for any specific approach.

Basically it exists as a way for us to have a starting point for talking about scalability topics, asking the candidate how they would evolve their implementation as we scale up the system. Does a pretty good job of giving us an idea of how they think through system design problems.

No joke, when we do interviews we have candidates give code review feedback. One of the pieces of code is a poorly written but functional “find the unique numbers” function. We have had ONE candidate say, “Just throw them in a set.” And in our separate chat where we discuss candidates, we were like, “Finally someone gave the right answer.”

(Not that there’s a wrong answer when code reviewing like this, but I was waiting for someone to come to that solution.)

Right, buy what if I get anxiety about the whole thing, start tellibg myself how bad I am at this, and panic inside my head so bad I can't read the words on the screen?

I talked general stuff with the Google guy (pingpong balls in a bus et al) but no coding challenges.

I guess I have truly left the realm of hard coding (at C) as it's all "solve this excellent infrastructure requirement and then rip out your brain and grab the crayons because it's in yaml and fucking ansible" now.

I've done a few coding challenges so far and hated all of them