[tom_b]

Hmmmm. Given a language X that is not used in actual development in an organization, at what point does interviewing with whiteboard coding in X become just another credential?

I like (FTA): "So I’ve picked a question that forces candidates to design a data structure" . . . "I’ll continue conducting my interviews in the language of the candidate’s choice"

As an even more general question to hackers here, what would impress you more? A candidate who comes in, whiteboards out an algorithm and data structure in C to solve a problem, or a candidate solves the same problem in Clojure?

Particularly if your org uses neither of those two languages :-) Of course, you have to grok the different paradigms you might use in both languages or you'll probably be unable to make a decent judgment.

[tedunangst]

My tactic interviewing people for a sysadmin position was to allow them to use any language they knew. For the most part it went well. Even someone who doesn't know a thing about programming can generally pick up how the interview is going from the candidate's reactions. But occasionally someone would quite confidently assert some code would do something I didn't think it did, but I didn't really have the powershell chops to call them on it. For a sysadmin position, there was no one language we could standardize on, and the interview was designed more to test ability to use one's tools, not to program, so it was the best we could do. We weren't going to make every candidate learn perl/python/ruby just to apply.

A dev candidate who solves a problem in clojure may be impressive, but since I'm less qualified to judge, I will be less confident hiring them. Your best chance to get hired is to convince me that you are better than everyone else, and the best way to do that is to do something impressive that I can compare to everyone else.

I've also had people go from passing to failing because they overreached. More than one candidate successfully produced a correct C solution and then sunk their own battleship by volunteering a completely wrong soliloquy on heap vs stack memory. "Noone knows you're stupid until you open your mouth." Do NOT use clojure if you're betting the interviewer won't catch your mistakes.