[Contusion3532]

My brother and I came up with an interview process for help desk positions many years ago. It was sort of an open-book exam. He set up a computer and a network printer. I believe he purposely misconfigured something with the networking of the network printer, possibly one other issue too.

They had 1 hour, utilizing any resource on the internet they wanted, to correctly configure the network printer. If they completed it, great, if not, he'd go through and see what their troubleshooting process was, what they researched, etc.

This type of interview worked really well for hiring help desk staff, but obviously hiring a software engineer and evaluating them is much more difficult.

[arp242]

I've thought about giving people an old Fortran project with a few small compile errors, and asking them to fix that. We're not using Fortran of course – it's just a test of pragmatic skill of Getting Shit Done™ without hand-holding.

Inspired because I had to do exactly the above a few months ago. I don't really know Fortran. I don't even know exactly why it failed to compile, but my fixes work (and verified to work correctly), so whatever. I just read the compile error, copied what other bits of the code do. Basic stuff really, but it would probably filter out the worst of it. I haven't put this theory to the test yet though.