[dorkrawk]

I've always thought that a good programmer job interview challenge would be to hand the candidate a laptop (preferably with their OS of choice) and have them build something simple but new. For example: "Have you ever built a web scraper in Ruby? No? Ok, Ruby's installed on this computer. Here's a CLI, a text editor, and a browser with Google open, feel free to make use of existing language resources, build me something that pulls some text off of www.example.com"

I think it's good to see how people learn new things and to see if the candidate looks for existing libraries rather than writing everything from scratch. You'd need to be able to give the candidate some time but I think it would be a valuable exercise.

[groby_b]

We used to do that at my previous company. We'd actually have several candidates come in together, have them form an ad-hoc team, and spend 6 hours on solving a real-world (toy) problem. With one existing team member on that test team, and a rotating team of observers.

It's a great method to hire, but it's expensive - you better make sure that the people you invite in are pre-checked quite well.

It definitely was the most fun I ever had interviewing.