Most eye-opening thing about programmer interviewing I've read: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions https://sites.g

Most eye-opening thing about programmer interviewing I've read: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho... I probe for weakness in 5-6 different areas of computer science in the phone screen - keeps me from bringing in weak candidates. Then in the on-site, I give them my Macbook and ask them to solve a few simple problems with some flat files I conjured in a language of their choice that's installed on that machine (C/C++/Java/Python/Ruby/PHP/Perl/shell/etc). You get an idea of how they solve problems, think about solutions, fix bugs, avoid common errors, and what they look up on the web (I let them use a browser to lookup apis and so forth - it's a good way to weed out "cut and paste" programmers). The people who do well finish quickly and we chat about the company with the remaining time - the people who do poorly use almost all the time on the first problem, make a bunch of mistakes, and usually don't understand the proper data structure for the job.