I just went through a round of interviews and came away with a better opinion of these "toy" interviews than I started with[1], so I'll play devil's advocate he

I just went through a round of interviews and came away with a better opinion of these "toy" interviews than I started with[1], so I'll play devil's advocate here: these questions have a place. The main reason to use these questions is that they're studyable. Google and Facebook both put out content that walk you through how to solve problems like this. When you get an interview, you can delay it as long as you want, they can tell you the sort of problems to study: go read "Cracking the Coding Interview". Facebook sends you a link to it and a video of the author working a problem. Google sends you stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKu_SEDAykw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKu_SEDAykw. There are thousands of toy questions, and it's not feasible to memorize them all. The correct _and expected_ thing to do is study up for the category. Now that your candidates have in theory studied, you'll get a studied, "best" performance for each candidate, and interview outcomes can be compared in a very low-bias, apples-to-apples way. I can't imagine the success criteria for a pairing being clearer than for toys. I think the potential for toy question interviews to be managed in a low-bias way is the main reason they're used. In comparison, how do you ensure that your exercise in go is exactly as hard as your exercise in Java? Or do they need to know go, or some other language? Or that they didn't spend longer on the take home than you asked? Or 100 other factors of your particular exercise? It's really hard to let every candidate shine on a level playing field using "real world" stuff. [2] That said, there's good reasons to do pairing, or a bug squash, or a take home, or juggling, or _anything different_. The first is that candidates with 15 years of experience don't show up better than college grads on "toy" questions, even if they've studied. You can only do so well on them, and experienced candidates tend to have options and won't put a lot of time in to studying. And the corollary to that is that the biggest tech employers are leaving some great candidates behind, because they interview better doing "real world" stuff. And your company can go get them, just because you bothered to do something different. Most companies won't outbid Google and Facebook, so why would your interview process try to find the same candidates they do? [1]: And to be clear: I did not get any offers from my interviews based entirely on this sort of question. I'm not the worst but far from the best. [2]: Triplebyte's long-ish video chat interview is the best thing I've seen at "standardizing" this.