General suggestions : - Make sure that the candidate has a really positive experience after the interview. That would mean being very courteous and not interru

General suggestions : - Make sure that the candidate has a really positive experience after the interview. That would mean being very courteous and not interrupting him when he/she is talking, etc. - When I interview candidates, I generally read up his resume and circle interesting topics/projects he has worked on. By engaging in a technical conversation with him/her you can gauge his ability. I despise interviewing processes which google/Amazon follow where they just throw a bunch of programming questions irrespective of what his skill set / role he is interviewing for. Being junior, you might not be exposed to all those technologies/terminologies in the resume, but that's where your learning comes in! If you are interviewing a senior candidate, see if he/she can actually explain a complex idea and distill it so that you are able to grasp it. Senior folks in the team are expected to lead/mentor junior engineers and his/her ability in this regard can easily be judged. Also, you can ask him/her to explain trade offs/design choices, etc. - With respect to programming question/design question, let the interview take its own natural course. Have a couple of back up questions just in case. My favorites are design LRU cache or something to that effect / atoi or something similar. The problem in itself is simple, but there are a lot of layers to it. You can see the candidate thinking through the problem loudly/arriving at a solution and improving on it. Please don't ask questions which are hit/miss - Eight Queens problem, etc. They are hardly useful! To summarize, - Make it a positive experience for the candidate. - Go for his resume - engage in a tech conversation. Ask for a design diagram, explain trade offs, etc. - Keep a couple of design/programming back up questions just in case. And have fun!