I was invited to an unexpected and urgent second postdoc interview (in less than 24h) - Is this fair? I had postdoc at a top 10 university in the world. The email of the first interview said I should expect questions around the job description. The first interview was very smooth and I felt very good about it.
A few days later, I received an email in the afternoon, the email said I have a second interview tomorrow morning and I should expect questions around the job description (I think these are just automatic emails).
The second interview however, was a bit different. In order to decide between me and another candidate, they said they needed a technical interview which they presented a problem I needed to solve in 10 minutes, the problem required a lot of programming skills and classic concepts. I haven't programmed in a while now and nothing in the job description not in the email says &quot;programming skills&quot;.
I gave okay answers and played it safe a lot in my problem solving approach. I couldn't solve the problem in the given time because I simply needed to refresh my memory and remember some concepts, but I did get a &quot;thumbs up&quot; from the potential PI when I was explaining some stuff. Unfortunately, I wasn't selected and I think the other candidate gave better answers.
Now days later, I can't stop thinking about that whole process. Normally, if the panel expects a presentation, they mention it in the invitation email. It's very weird and a bit unfair to do that to candidates they clearly liked in a very short amount of time. I truly believe that the interview could have been way better if they mentioned anything about a technical interview. Just because one candidate performed better (obviously, people are different), doesn't make the evaluation process fair. What do you think about the situation, is this a normal routine for postdoc interviews?
PS:
The postdoc was in the UK and I live in north Africa. I am saying this because perhaps it justifies why the HR send an email and didn't call (perhaps they can only call candidates within the UK). The field is Computer Science.
It's not respectful to applicants for the interview process to be unclear or changed at the last minute. However, for various reasons, many of them completely innocent (busy people, miscommunications), this may happen.
It's also not always transparent what an interviewer is looking for. If the interview has you attempt &quot;Task A&quot;, it may not be performance on Task A that you are being evaluated on. Instead, you may be evaluated for how you handle an unexpected change in plans. Or you may be evaluated on how you ask for clarification around a task, how you manage time if a task cannot be completed within the window you are given, what you do when you find you are stuck on something (do you ask for help? Stop and admit you are stuck? Make something up that might work? Pretend you know what you're doing?), etc.
Judging &quot;success&quot; on this sort of task is entirely up to the interviewer's views and opinion. As far as whether it's &quot;fair&quot;, well...the definition of &quot;fair&quot; is a moving target and various opinions would give various descriptions of &quot;fair&quot;. In one sense, as long as the same information is communicated in the same time frame to all the candidates, and all candidates are judged by the same criteria, it is &quot;fair&quot; among those candidates.
As far as whether it's the process that selects the true best candidate for the job, well... if we had a better way of determining the best candidate than the clunky interview process, we'd use that method instead.

I'm not sure you can do much about this except for continuing to interview for positions that interest you. Positions at desirable universities are likely to attract many qualified applicants, and you aren't guaranteed a job just because you're qualified. Ultimately, they have to select someone, and it's not even really possible for the person doing the hiring to know that they've got the best one.
I'd recommend not spending more time thinking about the process of this one interview. Maybe their expectation is that programming is a bigger part of the role but didn't think it was necessary to mention it. Maybe they had a preferred candidate already but lacked the justification they needed and invented this task on the fly to create it. Maybe they're disorganized. The answer, whatever it is, won't help for your next interview. Maybe you even dodged a bullet and this is a bad work environment, and had you been hired your next Academia.SE question would be about being stuck in a post doc where you're just treated as a programmer and aren't making any progress on independent research projects. Move on and forget this one.