Over the years, I have grown too weary of techniques/methods (that involve things like whiteboarding to prove one's worth as an algoninja) and a 2 hourish inter

Over the years, I have grown too weary of techniques/methods (that involve things like whiteboarding to prove one's worth as an algoninja) and a 2 hourish interview. I have found good succes with the following approaches. Being in a small firm helped, but I haven't had too many difficulties following this in a large-ish firm too. (product unit in an Indian firm) - don't hire in urgency. I believe in building a talent roadmap/planfor the team, capabilities over next 6 months, and thus hire someone who I see fit enough to grow into that role - have a questionnaire sent before, which has open-ended topics ( views and perspectives on containers, infosec, cloud, imperative vs declarative, microservices vs monoliths, their fitment (and otherwise) to use-cases - etc) - talk about a recent tech challenge the person was able to tackle and resolve, try getting to extreme levels of detail (to understand whether the solutiion was a true fix or just a patchy workaround), the tradeoffs made while going that route etc - try to do a systems design session, jointly. the problem statement closer to the actual line of work - try to use a seemingly open ended objective (cost optimization, reduction in MTTR. increase MTBF, increase scalability etc) relevant to our line of work or current set of problems and see if the candidate can find a good set of questions to find their way towards a workable solution, etc. - for simpler stuff, hiring interns and then grooming them into productive, trained members of teams is often a useful way - responsibility doesn't end at offer rollout. setting their teammates for success till they are in the system is the leader's responsibility However, when am on the other side (am the one who is answering, pursuing a job elsewhere), I have come to hate the find-the-algoninja ritual so much that have stopped taking up any that forces such a deal. Am better off retaining my sanity.