1: have you _ever_ had to invert a binary tree outside your interview? And if you have, not that many others have. 2: surprisingly, not all programming jobs re

1: have you _ever_ had to invert a binary tree outside your interview? And if you have, not that many others have. 2: surprisingly, not all programming jobs require opening a file (I used to run a question that required opening and writing a new file and got rid of it). 3: I love whiteboards for design questions. My suggestion for a technical interview (coding portion): take a real life problem you solved in the last year or so. Distill it down into something you could do in 15 minutes. Give the candidate 45 minutes to do it on a computer (preferably their own). For other important things you need them to know before they start (like if trees and file systems are important), just talk about them and ask questions. You can drill down as far as needed there and learn more than if they know the file api in the given language. I recently hired a guy who was green, and did not know how to open and read a file or do unit tests (really green). But given a laptop and a few minutes to read docs, he knocked it out. He has been a fantastic hire working on high scale, high available systems. I don't think he would have done well if the questions were on a whiteboard. Just my $0.02.