IMO, hiring is like a funnel. At the top of the funnel is the entire universe of people. At the bottom of the funnel is your hire. The goal is to filter out as

IMO, hiring is like a funnel. At the top of the funnel is the entire universe of people. At the bottom of the funnel is your hire. The goal is to filter out as many people as possible as quickly as possible. One key point is whether or not they can write code. Keep in mind writing code is the BARE MINIMUM required for a job. If they can't do that, they shouldn't be on-site in the first place. If you have your candidate taking a day off work and taking a day worth of engineering talent off engineering-related tasks, and you're spending that time asking them to write code, you've failed to apply the filter higher up in the funnel. Ideally, you verify their coding ability BEFORE you bring them into the office, whether via a tech phone call, live-coding session, or take-home assignment. Before the haters start saying "but they can fake it!", hold your horses. Once you've established that the candidate can code, when you bring them on-site, you quickly VERIFY your previous conclusions. You quickly VERIFY that the coding assignment you gave them was completed by them. This should take no more than 15-20 minutes. Maybe you just have them walk through a chunk of code. Maybe you ask them to recreate their answer. Something. Anything. But if you send in three different engineers, and they all spend the entire hour asking the candidate to solve programming tasks, you're literally evaluating the BARE MINIMUM of the hiring requirements. And there's so, so, so much more to being a good engineer than writing code. Outside of a QUICK verification, your on-site questions, imo, should NOT be writing code (or even pseudo-code). They should be about previous projects, architecture, personality, professionalism, punctuality, communication, teamwork, autonomy, and collaboration skills -- all the non-tangibles that answer the basic question of "Do I want to sit next to this person for the next 6-12 months?" If your idea of a good interview is to ask someone to generate a calendar between two dates or sort a list or find the minimum integer in a list, you're completely, totally missing the point. You're evaluating the bare minimum to get them in the door -- and if you're doing that in-person, you're wasting your time. You should have filtered that out before they walked in the door. Remember, these candidates are often lying to their bosses and calling in sick or using up valuable PTO to take an entire day off work to come sit in your office. Don't waste their time with redundant tests and things that you could have figured out before they walked in the door. (And dear god, some of the questions in these comments are... awful... at evaluating anything except, I dunno, getting the right answer. Yikes.)