To be honest, one of the best predictors I have for job performance is learning something new in a job interview. Sometimes I get the feeling there are far to f

To be honest, one of the best predictors I have for job performance is learning something new in a job interview. Sometimes I get the feeling there are far to few people like this in the industry, but if I want to hire great colleagues, that just works the best. Then again, I'd never ask a vanilla architecture question like the company in OP's post, as I've found that the best predictors for job performance are also the very questions that are the hardest to grade. Deep, open questions on a vast field — where there isn't anything close to a correct answer but rather thousands. I still often go with the good old "what happens when you enter xyz.com in your browser and hit enter?", just because I can take it anywhere I want. One day, I hit my bonus question "so what happens after hitting enter and before the first request leaving your computer?" And the guy was like "well, the microswitch pulls the line of the keyboard matrix from high to low, generating a scancode that's then turned into a keycode in the controller..." 5 Minutes later we were all over his self-built keyboard and he had a job offer in hand 30 minutes later. I don't even wait for HR for the good ones. Unfortunately he got an offer in hardware, and actually I was glad for him.