[sethammons]

I have had a strong hand in the technical interview design at my company. Push back on 45 minutes. I've put a line in the sand that we at least an hour for code and an hour for design, and we schedule those next to each other if we need to give more time to code.

For code, the key is to find a recent problem your team's have recently had to actually solve. Distill it down. As a interview question designer, give yourself 1/4 to 1/3 the coding interview time and see how far you get implementing the solution. That is the bar: don't expect a candidate to be able to get further than that in the whole time block. You also want to budget time to talk about productionizing the code (metrics, logging, monitoring, etc).

I had a question that I wanted to give and required a couple passing unit tests. After applying the 1/3 time rule, I realized that my question was unfair and I had to alter what I started with.