Sitting on the other side of an interview, I was so annoyed with the guy I was doing the interview with because he insisted on these algorithm challenges. I tol

Sitting on the other side of an interview, I was so annoyed with the guy I was doing the interview with because he insisted on these algorithm challenges. I told him these tasks are bullshit, because the job we do doesn't involve coding algorithms EVER. I wanted to focus on the ability to read messed up code and figure out what it roughly does and how to improve it. Turned out we were both kind of wrong, although I would claim my co-worker was way more wrong than me. Our candidates pretty much failed all these algorithm questions. And when my co-worker tried to help it turned out that he didn't have a proper grasp of the problems we presented either. My reading code test didn't work very well either, because these test subjects were fresh out of college and had little experience in reading larger code bases, refactoring and dealing with software engineering problems. Like most people in college they had mostly dealt with toy sized programs. So in the end what proved the best guide was plain old boring interview questions. Our interview was largely a failure but we hired the programmer on a hunch anyway based on her explanation of some theoretical subjects. It turned out that she worked out just fine despite failing pretty much all the tests we had made. That is because a lot of development these days is more about persistence, motivation and ability to google. She was practical, eager to find solutions and eager to google and that made her get stuff done.