He interviewed with a startup, and the early conversations with their head of platform went well — a good discussion, an interesting mission.
Then the first technical round arrived as a Hackerrank assessment, with no prior warning and no word of what it would contain. He opened it to find a shell-scripting prompt: pipe the output of one script into another, work with directories and exit codes — written from scratch, with no AI and nothing to look up.
He has six years of experience and could not write a full shell program cold. He did his best and failed. They never got back to him.
What frustrated him was not the difficulty. It was that there was no indication ahead of time and no option to choose a language. Bash, he noted wryly, was on his résumé, and he should probably take it off.