[angrybits]

From TFA (although I realize he's not advocating for this):

“Two of my colleagues will be joining us in a few minutes but I think we can get started. I’d like you to whiteboard an answer to the following prompt: given a string, write a program in any language you want that reverses the string.”

I have not, and will never, do such a thing on an interview. It'd be the shortest interview in history if I were ever asked to.

We have hired plenty of great people just by talking through the relevant technology and asking open ended questions. My thing was usually to talk through HTTP in detail, and I would loosely time how long it would take to get through chunked encoding. Then I'd ask "how would you solve this problem" question, to see how they attack a problem and how they stand up to me poking (sometimes unreasonable) holes in their plan. You don't need panels, committees, quizzes or any of that bs--just ask questions you know the answer to until you're comfortable that they're competent and pleasant to be around.

(I may or may not have gotten Entity Framework tech support for free from an interviewee once in the past, but we don't speak of such things.)