I've been doing a little interviewing at my company, hiring engineers. I tend to avoid the pop quiz questions because I, having been asked them in interviews be

I've been doing a little interviewing at my company, hiring engineers. I tend to avoid the pop quiz questions because I, having been asked them in interviews before, can't imagine they're that valuable, and, considering our field has plenty of introverts and autism spectrum-types, it's probably not representative of their abilities in a real work environment. HOWEVER. One candidate had a PhD and was very agreeable, had lots of experience in other companies in our field. So I skipped the programming test, since I figured a PhD with loads of experience must be able to code... A colleague of mine saw the candidate as they were leaving and ducked. I asked them why. "Well, I personally lead to them getting fired a few jobs ago." Turns out Colleague worked very closely with Candidate and Candidate can't code worth shit: Colleague ended up personally redoing a ton of Candidate's botched work, Boss noticed Colleague working way late for no good reason, and after several chances, had to let Candidate go since they couldn't do their job. Anyway, I've come to the conclusion that I need to ask in-depth technical problems, but I'll phrase it like this: "I'd like you to describe an A* path-finding algorithm the best way you can (pseudocode, diagrams, assembly, whatever). I'm not looking for a 'correct' answer, or syntax or class diagrams. I want to watch how you solve problems of which you only have a vague knowledge. If you'd like to refer to some resource, feel free to ask, and I'll tell you if I know, or I'll find out." I suspect this is the point of the technical question, but it's hard to tell what interviewers actually want.