I've found asking people to write a small program works pretty well. Like ask someone to build a command line app that arranges your mp3 files in folders of the

I've found asking people to write a small program works pretty well. Like ask someone to build a command line app that arranges your mp3 files in folders of their artist's name. You can even ask it to be whiteboarded, or coded in a notepad, no code execution or IDE. I found that to quickly tell you if someone can write programs. Surprisingly (and maybe not surprisingly), a lot of people can do difficult leetcode questions, but can't write a small app, or can't do it well. It'll quickly show you about how the candidate can come up with some level of UX, handle OSish level stuff, how they structure and think about their code and readability, how they model data, and depending on the app you ask them to write, it could include a little algorithm in it as well.