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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

"write out these problems on paper"

I write on paper so infrequently that I actually find it pretty difficult to write more than a few words. I certainly wouldn't want to write something out longhand in an interview!

Edit: It seems to me it would be rather unfair of me to ask people to write out their thoughts in Org Mode in VS Code just because that's how I happen to like writing notes :-)

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I had to do a timed exercise to write code on paper IN PEN at a job interview. Talk about feeling like I had to get it correct the first time. Glad they didn't give me an offer because I would've had to consider accepting it.

You problem used tabs rather than spaces ;-)

Seriously though - how long ago was that - not recently I hope?

Writing speed isn't the bottleneck hopefully :)

It's not a matter of writing speed, it's familiarity. I've been programming for 30 years and I don't think I've ever written code down on paper. Why ask an interview candidate to do something they've never done before and will never do again? You might as well ask them to type their code using only one hand.

As a heavy smoker, I'd be quite good in an interview where I was forced to type with one hand.

> I've been programming for 30 years and I don't think I've ever written code down on paper

I did it once or twice when I was 8 years old and didn’t have a computer yet :)

Writing speed probably would be the bottleneck for me - plus whatever I wrote would almost certainly be illegible to anyone else.

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