I've been interviewing a lot of candidates over the last couple of months and I also despise trivia question interviews. The approach I've been taking is using

I've been interviewing a lot of candidates over the last couple of months and I also despise trivia question interviews. The approach I've been taking is using a FizzBuzz type of question, but a bit more complex. I couldn't believe the number of candidates that have trouble with things like manipulating two arrays, which I feel is a basic level of expectation for a programmer. If I spend all hour on this relatively simple question, they are a "no" from me. About 10% of the interviewers pass this problem quickly enough to warrant the second question I ask. Frankly, I'm shocked at how under-prepared people are for whiteboard questions, regardless of how stupid it is. You would expect that by now, people would know to expect them. The second question is something that is hard, but I tell them upfront that I don't know the answer to the question, to put them at ease, and that I want to work with them together on the question. I also ask for pseudo-code, I don't care about syntax. I think this usually gives me a lot of insight into how good the candidate is. I had one recent candidate that wasn't a spectacular coder (he had bugs in his code and he couldn't see them until I almost had to point it out to him), but he had this intuitive ability to zero-in on the most efficient algorithm for both questions that I asked. I felt he was good enough to be hired. However, some other members of the team, while agreeing with my technical assessment, rejected him because of culture fit. He was a bit aloof and kind of weird. Some of the team felt like he might not be pleasant to work with, so they thought it was better to be safe than sorry. So sure, technical chops matter, but so does personality.