Some people don't like gotcha questions of this type for the reason that they often aren't relevant to the type of work you're hiring for. If you're more concer

Some people don't like gotcha questions of this type for the reason that they often aren't relevant to the type of work you're hiring for. If you're more concerned with productivity, a good technique I've used is to sit someone down at a computer and give them a simple programming task. Then sit near them and listen to how fast they type. Almost everyone is going to make noises about being nervous (because it is nerve wracking) but you can usually tell right away who is practiced in writing code and who is merely familiar with the theory of writing code. It's often hard to tell the two apart just by asking questions. Of course, you should look at the code afterward but a surprisingly high number of people don't make enough noise on their keyboard for you to even bother. An example web development task might be to create a form that asks for a search term and then returns all matching rows in a database. Easy, right? It's supposed to be. Of course, you could also limit yourself to hiring people with open source projects. But of all the people I've hired, the one who did best on the gotcha questions was also the least productive in terms of building software. So you want to get proof of productivity somehow.