[rootusrootus]

I have not yet run into anyone who could deep-dive into the details of what they're working on and talk about the good, bad, and ugly, who turned out to be incapable of coding. Maybe I've been lucky, but I think it's pretty hard to fake that level of knowledge.

For remote developers I do deviate slightly and I actually ask them to do a little coding, but that's because it's always someone in Hyderabad and the cultural differences make a deep-dive conversation with body language a lot harder to pull off. So I ask them to whip up a demo program that scores a game of Bowling, take as long as necessary, and bring the results to the interview and show me what they did. Not much but it works (and scoring a bowling game is actually not a bad test -- not as trivial as it sounds, but doesn't take a whole evening of work just for an interview).

[urahara]

Great approach! What you describe is pretty close to my understanding of what a good hiring process should be like.