You pretty obviously can’t do whatever you want. From a legal perspective you’ll be arrested and prosecuted if you commit a crime. From a philosophical perspective you have a moral duty to do good, by virtue of the intrinsic definition of good (whatever that may be in your ethical framework). Even if your ethical system says you should only do what makes you happy, you still have a duty to fulfill that goal as it is internally equivalent to the concept of good.
I enjoyed my interview at Google. They asked some generic questions, but also some stuff specific to my niche.
No one is expecting perfect code. I ended up saying something along the lines of “let’s just pretend the method is called isPresent() because I forget” to every interviewer.
A few years ago I was working for a QA department and trying to apply my programming skills wherever I could. There was a weekly report that someone in upper management produced to send to their peers, which was basically two filtered and cross referenced CSV dumps. I briefly took over that task while the manager was away, and was able to automate it pretty easily. I even produced a small GUI that made it easy for the manager to use later. Ultimately the manager chose to keep doing it by hand for 40 hours per week. I left that organisation a few months later.
Even as someone who hates typical definitions of professionalism, sitting in a kindergarten like room and having DNMs with my colleagues sounds like one of the least professional things I can think of.