[watwut]

The trouble with "nice discussion about past projects" interview style is that it is super easy to pretend way more experience and skill then you really have. You are literally measuring how smooth talking that person is and whether has good idea about what opinions are cool now.

That is what fizz buzz or basic algorithms are for. Because really,smooth talking incapable collegus do more harm then normal incapable ones.

[bluejekyll]

I disagree. I suggest you read about the behavioral interview. By using pretty well known techniques you can quickly get people into a situation where they feel comfortable in telling you about what they did or did not do.

For example, I recently had someone run through a distributed system's set of questions related to kafka and some AWS services. It became obvious through this questioning that what he had built was not capable of guaranteed message delivery, i.e. the system was lossy.

The rest of the interview was about this system and how he would rebuild it to make sure there were no messages lost between all the handoffs of the system. We got into many very detailed areas about persistence, atomicity, idempotentcy, etc.

It should not be a shoot the breeze conversation about buzz words, it should be a very detailed process of getting down to the most complicated piece of software someone has worked with. It becomes very clear, very quickly, if they are bullshitting you, and then you don't hire them.

[jakub_g]

Sadly this is very true. I had been working with a colleague who was a perfect talker about best practices and what not, and first to criticize the offshore team for bad coding, yet himself he was as well doing a lot of crazy things and sloppy coding, and breaking the build and shipping regressions on a regular basis.

Unfortunately I don't have a good solution to this problem.

I'm wondering how interviews in other professions look like. For example when you're a director of a hospital and want to hire a surgeon. I guess you don't ask him to come one day to make a little surgery for free.

[watwut]

Surgeons are heavily credentialed. You have to have school and residency and subsewuent tests what not. I don't think same would be appropriate for coders.

[vonmoltke]

Sounds more like poor work ethic and other issues of professionalism, not lack of knowledge.

[LVB]

Fizz buzz etc. might detect complete frauds, and at the other end some heavy algorithm questions might falsely reject good candidates who simply haven't applied that stuff in a long time. I think small at-home coding challenges are a sweet spot. They too reveal total rejects, but allow the rest to demonstrate their broader level of understanding and organization. And they make great follow-up discussion items.