So I've been on the flip side of this. I've worked at a company (multiple) which had no F-ing clue how to hire. They'd constantly hire terrible people who cou

So I've been on the flip side of this. I've worked at a company (multiple) which had no F-ing clue how to hire. They'd constantly hire terrible people who couldn't do the most basic things. I think one of the most important aspects of hiring is getting potential candidates in front of the team and letting them talk to the team, to see how they handle questions from other developers (and yes there is always that guy who tries to make the candidate look dumb for some reason). The most telling question I typically ask when interviewing is what have you worked on recently, why is it cool, and how have you added to the project. This gives the candidate a great opportunity to dive into their own experience. This way if they didn't answer my questions well it will give me some idea of their background. Oh hey this guy didn't know basic Javascript stuff off the top of his head because he's been working on the back end for 3 years. That's cool. I'd personally take someone who can talk to me about practical design decisions they've made on a project rather than knowing how to solve basic algorithms. If you graduated 8 years ago and you STILL know exactly how to implement a Binary Search Tree without needing a 10 min refresher then you are a better man than I am. I forgot that about 3 years ago. I don't mind that we expect developers to study for a tech screen but how much does that really tell us about them? They can study and know the basics, but have the ever worked on a large scale project where you have to make something work now vs, having time to do a perfect implementation? Where is their ability to tell their manager no, or their ability to weight COTS vs Custom Build? Sorry this touched a nerve, I just had a bad interview with a company. The tech screen was outside my IDE, couldn't copy paste (which sucks when you want to move a line or do some refactoring) and it was on topics I haven't looked at in 4 years. Luckily I'd spent 15+ hours studying so one of the questions was a gimme.