Comment by palisade

I once interviewed at a company that had you write a traveling salesman program where you were planning the shortest path of flights between cities. It was a take home test where you were given at least a week to complete it. I completed the test in record setting time (3 days earlier than most), mine was the only one that was fully documented with comments (no one else bothered to do this), they said I had the most visually stunning user interface (most were ugly or unusable; I even animated the plane flying between cities), the program came to the outcome in the shortest runnable time, out of all the submitters they said my program was the most optimized solution (not the best ever made, but the best submitted to this company so far), and mine was the only one that actually worked correctly and ran without flaws. They then proceeded to have me come in for the 6 hour interview in which they asked questions like, "Write a working hash table from scratch on the whiteboard." I got nervous and passed the question, they ended the interview early and rejected my application.