I've hired quite a few people and the process that I settled on turned out to be really working well. I will say that most of the hires were decidedly good deve

I've hired quite a few people and the process that I settled on turned out to be really working well. I will say that most of the hires were decidedly good developers. What I like to do is to ask people to explain and algorith to me, e.g. "What is a HashMap?" as in how does it work, what's a hash function and what's it good at? A lot of people cannot answer the question, because it's not relevant to their job, they just use it, put objects in the map, get objects out of the map. So if they don't know it, I will explain how HashMaps work to the potential hire. At least they'll all be walking out of the interview with a little bit more knowledge than they walked in. So we start with what's a hash function, how to choose a bucket and what happens in a collision. And then I ask people to explain to me what happens if I implement the hashCode as a constant function that always returns 1. Now what I want to see is that people digest what they just learned and apply it.I find that is a skill that is what developers do everyday and that it directly correlates with performance.