That's a good point. I work for a large, famous company, though. I'm expected to do a standard 45-minute interview with a prescribed focus area (most commonly s

That's a good point. I work for a large, famous company, though. I'm expected to do a standard 45-minute interview with a prescribed focus area (most commonly system design or algorithms/coding) and to evaluate candidates in relatively standard ways. If anyone has tips for putting a nervous candidate at ease in this situation, I'm all ears. One thing that I think helps is that I ask markedly simpler questions than other interviewers often do. (We can see each other's notes.) This takes away some of the time pressure and lets the candidate and me go through requirements gathering, verbal/whiteboard descriptions of the problem/algorithm, and a few revisions of the code and debugging and such together if necessary. It also avoids the "candidates need to bring their own finer-tipped whiteboard markers to write the solution on the board" sorts of ridiculousness. It might mean I can't reliably tell the difference between "hire" and "omg best I've ever seen hire hire hire" based on the few lines of simple code a good candidate might ultimately write but I don't care about that.