[hibikir]

The best interviews for Software Engineers I've been a part of, on both sides of the table, were those in which a certain level of preparation was expected.

If I ask you random language questions, that you've not prepared for, I am not selecting you for being a good developer, but by being good at remembering language minutiae, which you could always google anyway. Now, if instead I hand you 2000 lines of code 2 days in advance, and tell you that we'll be working on them during the interview, I get a much better approximation of what you can and can't do in a real life scenario. Can you become very familiar with a tiny codebase quickly? Can you really analyze it critically, and tell me where it sucks? When asked to fix bugs, or make code changes, can you make the changes actually fit into the existing structure, or are you going to want to rewrite the world?

If you'd get a very different result in an interview if I gave you the questions I was going to ask an hour in advance, then I am not testing work skills at all. You don't hire a juggler by seeing if he is good at playing basketball, you watch him juggle.