I call bullshit on this train of thought. I've been reading about this on HN and reddit for years now. This last December, I was promoted high enough, that I

I call bullshit on this train of thought. I've been reading about this on HN and reddit for years now. This last December, I was promoted high enough, that I could design the entire interview process (with executive help) for my teams. Which was important, I very much need to hire some people. So, keeping posts like this in mind, I designed as follows: Phone Interview - We talk about you, the company, etc. Then a few technical questions. Do you know certain things about js that make me think you are genuinely familiar with the language (as opposed to just jQuery)? Do you know certain things about sql that make me think you are genuinely familiar with the technology (as opposed to just using a table designer)? Assessment Test - Do a quick crud app, that will require some thought behind how to query the data. Make a point when talking to the prospective applicant that the code will be read by the team members they'll be working with, so while you can do the test quickly, please spend enough time on it that we can talk about the code, your choices, etc going into the technical interview. Ie) don't just link together 3rd party plugins. Actual Interview - Interview with leads, interview with actual team members. Offer both use of Visual Studio / SSMS / IDE of choice or whiteboard. Ask questions about technology in general. Ask the applicant to explain how he'd design out a new feature. Change the feature spec, so that there's a little bit of a hard problem. Have to populate a tree from flat sql data, or aggregate data from a service, or some other not-quite-an-algorithm question. The RESULTS? Recruiters figure out what questions you are most likely to ask during the phone interview, and school the candidates. The assessment test? No one bothers, everyone just hands in the simplest 3rd party libraries plumbed together with shitty code. Was the question select top per group? How about top 1 *? The really good devs shine through here, but a huge percentage don't even bother. Actual Interview? No one uses IDE / SSMS. All of them choose whiteboard. The ones who genuinely know how to code, have no problem answering, and would be fine answering algorithm questions straight out. The ones who can't, get confused somewhere or other. They try to implement hacks around the problem (I'd have the dba do it), then fail to actually solve the question. So In Short? I completely understand where this guy is coming from. But I also think, that at this point, I'm so tired of interviewing people who clearly don't care about their craft, that I want to start asking nothing other than algorithm questions... because the guy or gal that actually answers them will actually care about their craft. And at least with algo questions, I can change the question easily, and frequently. Coming up with real code problems, and good probing questions is much harder, particularly if they're going to have a short shelf-life before recruiters start training their candidates with answers.