I was interviewing a couple of months ago, and one of the in-person technical interviews wanted me to write, on a whiteboard, a function that took in a timestamp and calculated the angle between the hands on a clock set to that time. After I did that they wanted me to reverse engineer the linux “tac” command for files of unknown size that I could not store the contents of locally, resulting in probably the most sinful piece of code I’ve ever written.
What really gets my goat about it, is that out of all my interviewing companies, they were by far at the bottom of the list, and was really only interviewing to get negotiating power. My company had worked pretty closely with them, so I was well aware of the poor treatment and absurdly high turnover rate, so they were really in no place to be picky. My top choice company’s hardest question was one of those basic college programming math questions where the answer is “use the modulus operator”.