[paulhart]

I agree wholeheartedly with the above. Gotcha questions are nice if you value having a sense of superiority over your candidates. Seeing how someone approaches a simple coding exercise tells you a lot about their techniques.

Two examples stand out:

1) A guy who had more Java certifications than had eaten hot dinners couldn't complete the simple exercise after three or four hours of effort.

2) Guy initially attempted to hit Google up for examples (why not!), and on finding that the net connection was disabled for that user account, wrote the best solution to the exercise I've received.

Overall, my interviewing process has had two stages. First, talk to the candidate and get a sense of what kind of person they are, and if they'll fit in with the culture. Second, if they seem reasonable, give them the test and see what their code is like. It's not foolproof, but it does weed out most of the weaker candidates.

[bmj]

This is exactly how I was hired at my current employer. The VP of product dev interviewed me, and asked very general tech questions regarding work I've done. Then I was hammered by my now-direct manager. I didn't have any resources, but his questions often evaluated my thought processes as well as my coding skillz.

I should add that I thought I bombed the technical interview. So much so that I wanted to ask the VP if he had the right guy when he called with the offer.