A lot of the Python ones seem like fairly poor phone screen questions to me. I like to ask my candidates to solve a realistic problem just like they would if th

A lot of the Python ones seem like fairly poor phone screen questions to me. I like to ask my candidates to solve a realistic problem just like they would if they were working at a desk with me. Q&A where they either know the answer or do not are awful. "Me: Do you know this random fact about python? Them: No... Crickets: <awkward cricket noises>". <-- All I've learned from this is that they don't know that fact and I have zero idea of their coding and problem solving ability. Instead we ask them to pair program on a live IDE and tell them that using Google is okay (copy/pasting code is not). I don't care if you have the standard library memorized, I care if you can solve problems and have the experience to understand how your code can fail and how to make it robust. I care if you can write clean code and then later easily refactor it when I add some complications to the problem. I care if you know how to make it perform well, etc. Testing for Linux skills? Give them a broken VM/Vagrant image and ask them to troubleshoot it, fix it, and install and configure some things. Testing for Ansible/Puppet/Chef knowledge? Ask them to do all of the above and send you the playbook to recreate the fixed image from your broken image. Interviewing is hard and if you haven't spent many hours thinking on it, setting it up, testing it against your current employees, and figuring out some kind of score sheet so it isn't 100% subjective, then everyone is going to have a bad time.