I started by reading through the existing code, and then after a few minutes (even before I had finished looking at the code), the interviewer told me that's enough. In another similar incident, I was given an incomplete codebase in an interview, and asked to finish it and make necessary modifications to get it running. it seems reasonable to expect that code written by a an experienced developer will compile, minus the occasional typing error, and even if it doesn't, it's not as if I would have to rewrite a portion of the code in order to fix the compile error. Except in extreme circumstances when I'm experimenting with obscurities around edge-cases on things like virtual functions in derived classes, etc. If anything, interrupting your coding to search for missing semicolons would probably be detrimental to your efficiency.
In my understanding that's an invalid argument, because "getting code to compile" for a given length of code generally involves fixing a constant number of compile errors and takes a fairly constant amount of time, which should be the same whether you do it after you finish writing the code, or if you interleave it with your coding time. I asked him what the difference is, and he said "what would you have done if you finished the code and it didn't compile in time." However, what puzzled me was that after I handed over the completed code, the interviewer told me that the only thing I did wrong was "not compiling as I go along". (Incidentally, I did get an offer from them.) I may have spent 5-10 minutes working out compile errors and a couple minor bugs, but overall it was very smooth. After about 45 minutes, I compiled, ran it, and got it to work. It wasn't a huge amount, probably less than 100 lines. I recently had a job interview in which they gave me an hour to write some real code. This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.
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