The other thing I've embraced is that there isn't a right way to interview, or perhaps more accurately, there isn't anybody who can be trusted to identify it. This again factors into my willingness to not feel too bound up by convention.
I certainly may have brought my own feelings into the multi-day marathon issue, but it's for the purpose of making sure I understand the other side of the table. I think not appreciating giving away two days of your time is of a different nature than not liking to write code in an interview. The latter seems pretty clearly like a "suck it up" problem, if you know what I mean. Personally, I consider the interview being unpleasant for the interviewee is a given, and all I can do is minimize that, I can never eliminate it, because the stress and uncertainly is sufficient on its own to make the process unpleasant.
In interviews when I ask code problems, I try to do my best to work with the interviewee. They get to pick the language, and I'm generally not looking at any style issues at all (if by "style" we mean "things that have no impact on running code"). If anything I'm a little too accommodating when I also ask them to choose their own data structures for the problems in question. This throws a surprisingly large number of people. (It's the price of allowing people to pick their implementation language; I'm not going to go write a separate test problem for each of the ten languages I might reasonably expect to get an answer in, especially when I don't even know them all. I actually feel I've sort of blundered into a good test here; a surprising number of people know "arrays" and nothing else and choose very bad representations for things of their own free will.)
I certainly may have brought my own feelings into the multi-day marathon issue, but it's for the purpose of making sure I understand the other side of the table. I think not appreciating giving away two days of your time is of a different nature than not liking to write code in an interview. The latter seems pretty clearly like a "suck it up" problem, if you know what I mean. Personally, I consider the interview being unpleasant for the interviewee is a given, and all I can do is minimize that, I can never eliminate it, because the stress and uncertainly is sufficient on its own to make the process unpleasant.
In interviews when I ask code problems, I try to do my best to work with the interviewee. They get to pick the language, and I'm generally not looking at any style issues at all (if by "style" we mean "things that have no impact on running code"). If anything I'm a little too accommodating when I also ask them to choose their own data structures for the problems in question. This throws a surprisingly large number of people. (It's the price of allowing people to pick their implementation language; I'm not going to go write a separate test problem for each of the ten languages I might reasonably expect to get an answer in, especially when I don't even know them all. I actually feel I've sort of blundered into a good test here; a surprising number of people know "arrays" and nothing else and choose very bad representations for things of their own free will.)