I've been in a couple of these interviews before and I've also had to try to interview programmers I wanted to work on projects for me ... an interesting approa

I've been in a couple of these interviews before and I've also had to try to interview programmers I wanted to work on projects for me ... an interesting approach that I haven't had the opportunity to test exhaustively is to start out like the computer SAT exams. Let me explain. On the SATs, they ask you a simple question, and if you get that right, they step up the difficulty and on an on until they discover you're a genius. If you get the answer wrong, they ask you another question of similar difficulty to the last question you got right and on and on. Now with regards to interviewing, I like to start from the basics ... I'll start out with simple questions about languages they've used, so that they're comfortable. Syntax isn't majorly important to me, you can google it ... however I take note of how comfortable the interviewee is with the syntax of the languages they're using (especially if its one we use). So while it won't count against them, it can count in their favor. From there I'll ask them more difficult questions. How would you implement this one thing? We have this one problem we're dealing with, how would you solve it? If they can't do it, I'll try another and another, giving them multiple chances to show that they can hang. All the while I'm poking and prodding to find out how they think about stuff ... and what makes them tick. And then I'll go to the really hard computer sciencey stuff (which bores me to tears to be totally honest. sorry.) ... just to see how proficient they are with it. Obviously a person who eats algorithms and datastructures for dinner in addition to acing all the other stuff is someone I'd love to have if they work well with us on a small project we'll have them do. I do the same thing with programs they've written, side projects they've done etc. To summarize, I'm just trying to find out where they are on a continuous scale from "total newb" to "could write os x from scratch if they needed to" Basically, I think brain teasers CAN be useful, but I think we should use them carefully. Value the way someone thinks over just them just getting answers correct. my 2c