[bastawhiz]

On the flip side, an interview where you're doing relevant work with another engineer is a way to evaluate whether you're a decent person to work with. I've hard-passed on candidates with immaculate resumes and huge open source portfolios because they were rude and insufferable. When you're hiring, you're building a team, you're not hiring individuals who work in isolation.

In a previous life, I was forced to work under a very senior engineer who was/is a well-known thought leader with a handful of books published. His leadership was nothing short of abysmal: he had no people skills, answering questions with links to e-books he'd written for O'Reilly in lieu of responses. The best engineers got tired of being micromanaged and nit-picked and left. It doesn't matter how smart you are if the other people at the company hate working with you.

There are many coding interview objectives (and I won't defend interviews which try really hard to ensure you know how to code) but pair programming and systems design questions are absolutely necessary to understand whether the person you're hiring isn't just qualified, but rather the kind of person who will make the team better overall.

[goodrubyist]

But, how are you qualified to make that determination (as in whether a person is decent enough to work with)? Isn't it likely that you either get a skewed impression of this from an interview or that you are biased yourself? The person you reject for lacking decency could be your interviewer in another situation, and reject you for the same reason.

* not trying to imply that there is no objective way to define/measure decency

[bastawhiz]

There's no objective measure of decency. I'm qualified to offer my subjective input while evaluating the candidate because I'll be on the team that has to work with them.

And frankly, I'll happily take the L if the candidate rejects me as the interviewer at another position. I have no right to assert that I'm the best possible candidate for their role because the job at hand isn't strictly about quantitatively measured qualifications. Though, if I rejected a candidate for being unpleasant, chances are I'll withdraw my application upon seeing they're and interviewer. Why would I change my mind about working with that person?