An amusing employment opportunity interaction

So I was recently doing some casual employment opportunity exploration (as one should do periodically, even if the situation is not pressing if nothing else just to see what else might be out there, and to keep one's interviewing skills updated), and a funny thing happened.

I was being screened by a developer as part of a normal process, and got a typical "test" problem to write an implementation for. In this case, it was something which would be real-world applicable, but still small enough to be feasible for an interview time slot. Germaine to the story is that, for this interview, the other party was not using an online shared text editor for sample code, but rather just having me share my favorite (or handy) IDE/editor from my local system to write the code in.

Now, for this instance the position I was being evaluated for was primarily Windows-based, so naturally I opened Visual Studio, and switched from my default most recent personal project to a new blank file, where I took down the problem description as described. As I was doing this, though, I realized that what the counterparty was describing was something I had already written for my own open-source library, which was the same project which I had already had open in Visual Studio.

So I asked if I could just show him the solution I had already written for my open source library, and explain it to him, rather than writing it again. He said that was okay, since I already had it open, and I did so. The total explanation took about a minute, he was satisfied that I fully grasped the solution (I'm sure the working and unit tested code helped with that), and we were done with that section of the examination.

Now obviously all interviews don't go like this (or mostly any), but it was pretty funny to happen to have code readily available which solved the exact problem being asked for, including being computationally optimal and templated already, which I could just point at. I feel like notwithstanding effort to make interviews objective and separable from any previous work, it would really save a lot of time if one could just point to working code one had previously written (say, open source utility libraries), and assert that you can write code based on those previous efforts. I wouldn't expect that to be the norm (especially since it's comparably easy to fake), but I can attest that it's pretty cool when it does happen like that, to an expedient and positive outcome. :)