"Code It From Scratch. No Google."

It’s the nightmare scenario for every software engineer. You sit down for an interview, ready to discuss algorithms or system design, and the interviewer drops a bomb: "Build a complete production-grade system. Right here. Right now. From memory."

This is exactly what happened to a tech professional in Pune, India, whose LinkedIn post recounting the ordeal has gone viral, igniting a firestorm of criticism against unrealistic hiring practices in the tech industry.

The Task

According to the post, the candidate—an experienced DevOps engineer—was asked to write a complex GitHub Actions CI/CD workflow end-to-end. The catch?

• No documentation.
• No Google.
• No IDE with autocomplete.
• Zero syntax errors allowed.

"They expected me to memorize thousands of lines of YAML syntax," the candidate wrote. "I build pipelines every day. I know how they work. But I don't memorize every single indentation and keyword. That's what documentation is for."

The Internet Reacts

The post struck a nerve, amassing thousands of likes and comments within hours. Techies from Silicon Valley to Bangalore weighed in.

• The Consensus: "Ridiculous." Most engineers agreed that memorizing syntax is a poor proxy for skill. Real engineering is about problem-solving and knowing how to find information, not being a human encyclopedia.
• The Hiring Managers: Some defended the interviewer, arguing that for a "Senior" role, deep familiarity is expected. However, they were largely shouted down. "Einstein didn't memorize his own phone number," one commenter noted.
• The meme treatment: Twitter (now X) quickly turned the story into a meme, joking that the next interview round would require candidates to build a microprocessor from sand.

Why This Matters

This incident highlights a growing disconnect between how we work and how we hire. In the real world, developers use tools. Copilot, ChatGPT, StackOverflow, and official documentation are always open in tabs. Asking a candidate to code without them is like asking a carpenter to build a table without a hammer.

It creates a "false negative" filter: you reject great engineers who rely on modern tools, and potentially hire those who just memorized a textbook but can't think critically.

Advice for Interviewers

If you are hiring, take note:

1. Test for Thinking, Not Memory: Ask how they would design the pipeline, not the exact syntax.
2. Allow Resources: Let them use Google. Seeing what they search for is often more illuminating than the answer itself.
3. Be Realistic: If you wouldn't do it in your day job, don't ask it in an interview.

As for the Pune techie? He didn't get the job. And judging by the internet's reaction, he dodged a bullet.

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Have you had a horror interview story? Share it with us in the comments.