It's really in the best interest of the interviewer to set hard time limits. If you want your developers to work reasonable hours and be productive, you better

It's really in the best interest of the interviewer to set hard time limits. If you want your developers to work reasonable hours and be productive, you better hope that they can get shit done in a reasonable amount of time. A start would be to time-box your interviews. Then maybe time out your own day and realize that spending 4 hours on an interview means that you miss dinner, sleep, your workout, and/or social time. I wouldn't want to force a future coworker through that mess. So, now you've got to limit your interview to a couple of hours. Luckily, since 80% of industry is satisfied with trivia questions, you don't really need to try that hard to design an interview that helps you find better candidates than your competitors.