[mrexroad]

whiteboarding perfect syntax, delving into absurd language minutia and "gotchas", f'ing around w/ brain teasers while an interviewer introduces behavioral stressors (sighs, ticks, etc.) to see how i problem solve "under pressure" ...is all bullshit.

so yeah, ask me to program. i mean, srsly program. let's hack together for an afternoon; hell, let's do a full day of paired programming to knock out a small bug in your code base. you'll learn a hell of a lot more about what i know, how i communicate, steps i take when i do when i don't know something, and what my processes are. this soft, inter-engineer-social stuff is overlooked over far too often; i wan't to work with people who will amplify my process and abilities, and in turn i'll amplify theirs. smarts don't count for enough.

[robocop]

I don't think this approach would scale, due to the time investment required. It also suffers from making it hard to compare one candidate to another in a fair way, unless you have everyone fix the same bugs. Having a bunch of canned bugs to be fixed doesn't seem much better than asking a CS puzzle.

[Evbn]

I Lways ask people to slave a simplified version of an actual problem I have worked on recently. Some times I even learn some thing.

Comparing candidates is irrelevant. You just want N hires that can contribute in your environment.