I'll give you the best interviewing experience I had as some inspiration for improving it. (I have had far more with people wasting time or rejecting technical

I'll give you the best interviewing experience I had as some inspiration for improving it. (I have had far more with people wasting time or rejecting technical tests because of ridiculous reasons than pleasant experiences). The interviewer asked me to bring in a laptop with some code I could discuss. I did, we discussed. He asked me some questions, I added a simple feature at his request. No time wasted on my part (ok, I was in a position that I had code I could bring in). It was code I knew, so no gotcha or anything fancy. Relaxed, friendly, the interviewer learned something rather than trying to one up me. Like I say the only downside I can see to this approach is that people may not have a side project that they can share easily. In which case they will have to do the equivalent work of a normal technical test. So the worst case scenario using this method is the same as the standard scenario.