How do you feel about being asked to code during an interview?

Did I mess up this job interview by being evasive?

• I think I more or less lied by omission in a job interview that I had a bit over a week ago. I am feeling a bit guilty about it and kind of mad at myself. Do those feelings seem warranted given the situation? Would this be a red flag for you as an employer if you found out about it? Applied to Dream Company about a month and a half ago. Was called for a phone screen about two weeks later, which went okay. They followed up about a week later and asked to schedule a short phone screen/interview with the department head. This went mostly okay, although I wasn't quite happy with some of my responses to his questions and felt like somehow my answers weren't as amazing as he was expecting - I just had the feeling that he was excited to talk to me at the beginning of the conversation, but then somehow my answers fell flat. One of the things that he asked about during the interview had to do with a school project that I completed last year, which was listed on my resume. The school project was actually completed in collaboration with an international affiliate of Dream Company, so he was curious to know more. In retrospect, I kind of wished that I had left the project off of my resume, because I was never completely happy with how it turned out. I had high hopes for the project at the beginning, but somehow things just didn't vibe. Our Main Contact with Dream Company Affiliate left 1/3 of the way through the project, and although we got a New Contact who was dutiful in providing feedback on our progress, I think we (it was a group project) kind of consistently felt like New Contact saw providing feedback more as another task to complete than as a two way street where he and Dream Company Affiliate could benefit from the research we were doing. He was perfectly nice to us and responsive, but just probably had other things to work on and didn't see us as a resource. The final product was probably only of middling quality, although we got a decent grade on it. Sometimes when I look at it now, I am a bit embarrassed by how many typos there were in it - it really could have used a good edit before turning in the final copy. Anyway, in the phone screen with the department head, I was asked about the project. I gave kind of a generalized answer with not much detail. Not because I was trying to be evasive particularly, but just because I was feeling kind of anxious and also because I didn't actually know the answers to some of the questions he asked (ie, wanted to know which affiliate office it was with - apparently there are more than one in the country where Dream Company Affiliate was). After the phone interview, I had a generally positive feeling about things. However, instead of inviting me for a panel interview (which the HR person had told me was the next step), I was asked for my references after the interview with the department head. I supplied my list (which didn't have anyone from Dream Company Affiliate on it, though it did have someone from Dream Company who I had previously worked with a number of years back). I know that they called at least two of my references, who communicated with me. They asked me for the panel interview. The panel interview was last week, and I am not really super happy with how it went. I think I kind of rambled and there were one or two questions where I had to take a long time to think of a response. In general, I wish I had been better prepared and more confident. But what I am really kicking myself over is that the department head asked for more information about the school project (which office, who did we work with, tell me more about it) and I only gave kind of partial information, telling him the name of Main Contact, but not the name of New Contact. I made reference to how Main Contact had left midway through the project, and then described what we had ended up working on and the output of the project and made reference to how the collaboration hadn't been as great after Main Contact left. Now it has been over a week since I heard back from Dream Company, and I am thinking that I probably didn't get the position. Probably partly because I didn't really do that great in the interview, but I am also feeling like it is likely that they called Main Contact (since the department head seems to be so interested in the project's outcome, and made some comment about checking my references at the end of the interview when I asked how long it would take to hear back from them, even when I know they have already checked my references), who referred them to the main office at Dream Company Affiliate, which would have told them to talk to New Contact. I am not sure what New Contact would say about our work (probably that it was okay but not great and possibly that there were a fair number of typos), but in any case I feel like just the fact that New Contact exists and I didn't mention him reflects poorly on me. If you were the hiring manager and you followed up on this, would you see the fact that I didn't mention New Contact as a red flag? Or maybe the middling quality of the project would be the red flag. Immediately after the interview, I just felt like I had handled this all wrong and killed my chances. I wrote a thank-you note the day after the interview and got a positive response from the department head saying that he enjoyed talking with me and that they would be back in contact shortly. But a week and a half (the time since our last contact) doesn't seem like shortly, so I keep imagining that he had called Main Contact but not gotten to New Contact yet by the time he responded to me. Maybe I am over-thinking this?

• Answer:

  As a thought experiment, let's say you did handle this all wrong. What could you do now to fix it? Absolutely nothing. You can't go back in time to mention New Contact in the interview and you can't go back in time and proofread the project. Given that the project was with an affiliate of this particular company and that is presumably why it interested these interviewers so much, you can't even apply any knowledge gained here to future interviews very well, because future interviewers are unlikely to be so interested in the project. So there is really nothing to be gained by worrying about this, which means you should let it go.