I am very skeptical about these interviews. All I am ever interested in is a code sample. That will answer all coding questions. It can not even be compared to

I am very skeptical about these interviews. All I am ever interested in is a code sample. That will answer all coding questions. It can not even be compared to forcing a nervous candidate to code by writing on a white board. It also can not be compared to a quiz on topics in programming. Get a code sample, read it, ask a few questions about it, that is all. As to if a person would "fit' on a team, it takes roughly 3 seconds to figure that out. So have each team member meet with the candidate for 1 minute, that's plenty of time. Then do a background check, call references and that's all there is to. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors BS. It selects for people good at interviewing, not good hackers. And lastly you can always fire people, if they lied about their code sample or whatever. So lets stop acting as if hiring someone is irreversible. In America at least, firing people is still easy. There's one thing to note about large companies. Large companies can't trust one good developer to evaluate a code sample. So that's bad, and they then fall back on a day long dog and pony show. And then they usually have huge, ugly, crufty code bases, that means that they can't even tell if someone is good or bad until AFTER they grok the code base. And groking the code base often takes a LONG time. So to pay someone for months only to then fire them and start again is expensive. And the moral of the story is: Stay away from big companies.