> In fairness, I'm selective with the candidates I decide to interview, from usually large pools. I agree with your thoughts on interviewing, but the "real-tim

> In fairness, I'm selective with the candidates I decide to interview, from usually large pools. I agree with your thoughts on interviewing, but the "real-time coding" session in my mind isn't part of the interview, it's part of the pre-interview screening process that you gloss over here. Asking programmers to code tough problems on the phone or whiteboard is a good test of certain personality traits, but not a good test of programming skills. On the other hand, there are problems so simple that a decent programmer should consider them to be typing rather than coding, and I think they make perfectly decent initial screening tasks. FizzBuzz is the obvious example here, but I think it's too popular to be useful. I periodically hear from devs who say they get so nervous in interview situations that they can't program at all, but no type of screening is going to be perfect. And I much prefer this kind of objective screening process to more subjective ones, which tend tend to devolve into "let's choose people with backgrounds similar to mine".