[tgflynn]

Finally, sad to say, the majority of job applicants are not competent to do serious engineering work.

I've often heard this claim. I have no data for denying it.

However I have a suspicion that when people make this claim the observation that it is actually based on is that "the majority of job applicants aren't very good at answering programmer interview questions.". They are hence making an implicit assumption that not being good at interview questions implies not being competent to do serious engineering work. I think this assumption is highly suspect, because of the extreme differences in stress levels, time scales and general context between interviews and actual work situations.

[aristus]

That is a very good point, but what alternative do you suggest? Keep in mind that hiring can consume a lot of existing employee time.

[silverlake]

Strongly encourage applicants to contribute to any open source project. Reviewing this code will tell you more than any stupid programming question. This takes less time and can be done asychronously. An interview can be used to determine if the qualified applicant will fit in your culture.

And if they haven't contributed any open source code, then whack them with stupid programming questions.

[tgflynn]

I posted this comment on the subject a while ago that describes the process I would use:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966689

The responses were interesting, ranging from "that would never work" to "that's what we do and it works great".