Oddly enough, I don't think I've ever written code in an interview. When I was hired as a subcontractor in 1977 (at age 15) to write software for the school district's grading and testing processing group, I had already written a chat/email system through which I had met the contractor. Thus, no skill demonstration required there.

My next software job was a transfer from a writing group at Tektronix where I'd been leading a team of people documenting operating systems, compilers, assemblers, and debuggers (and met the famous "Lyle" and "Jack" attributed in the preface to my books), into being a software project manager for the group my writing group had been documenting. Again, no demonstration of my skills were required, as the group had had enough of me coming in to their specification phases and finding holes. {grin}

My first contracting job as Stonehenge was for a body shop that had badly blown a client's database implementation, and needed me to give a second opinion on how badly their first contractor had sucked (the client already having the first opinion). I was highly recommended by my software contractor friend, and therefore didn't have to demonstrate anything again. That cycle was repeated once again at another firm (demonstrating how much the previous guy sucked and why). (As you see, I have many years practice at code review. {grin})

After that, the next proper programming gig I got was working for a large chip company with some offices in Phoenix, who had advertised in 1994 for "someone who knows some Perl" to work on the now-ill-fated Iridium project. To which I replied "I know a little Perl; check the back of Programming Perl or Learning Perl for my brief resume and let me know if that's enough". Bingo, got a year-long gig from that. Again, no demo required.

At this point, with a 22-year resume, if someone asks me to demonstrate my coding ability, I'll probably just chuckle, and move on. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker