Agreed on first two points. You often can get a feel of a company based on the interview. > I don't understand when companies try to give test assignments to s

Agreed on first two points. You often can get a feel of a company based on the interview. > I don't understand when companies try to give test assignments to senior developers. I think this is perfectly valid, though. When I interview candidates, I start with the conversation and I can tell you that more often than not it goes very well: talking about software design, architecture, what they think about various frameworks, etc. But you would be surprised how many people can talk their way through the interview, and then get totally blocked on a simple syntax error in the code. (Stress being accounted for). I agree, though, that the questions should be fairly designed before the interview and be consistent with the level of the expertise expected for the position. I would never ask a senior developer to implement a FizzBuzz. We'd rather sketch an architecture for some piece of software with some specific constraints, discuss the choices of the language and libraries and argument them, etc. And yes, eventually code something: just sketch some core domain logic. I would never hire a software developer, whatever the level, without seeing them coding first.