> consider myself a relatively poor interviewer and I usually decline to do them unless they intersect my subject area (compilers, GWT, etc) First, given you u

> consider myself a relatively poor interviewer and I usually decline to do them unless they intersect my subject area (compilers, GWT, etc) First, given you understand your limitations as an interview, you're probably a better interviewer than most -- including myself :-) An employer I worked for made it very difficult (but certainly not impossible, implausible, or even socially unaccepted) to stop interviewing altogether. Instead, they'd take a different approach: in addition to trying to match interviewers with candidates, they would also perform analysis on interviewer's previous feedback (e.g., are they constantly voting down candidates that go on to receive an offer after additional review, or vice-versa?) and weigh the feedback accordingly. I'd be highly surprised if Google doesn't do this. I do agree that usual "watch an experienced candidate do the interviews" approach to training is insufficient: this is much like expecting one to become a better candidate by watching a strong quickly "get" an algorithmic question with an a-ha insight, it looks easy when you already know the answer. I love the anagrams example from Programming Pearls -- it appears as "aha" problem, seems obvious to those who already know the answer -- but the book describes in detail on how it represents an entire class of problems and how to achieve that seeming insight using a more structured approach. As an aside I actually finding interviewing others to be much harder than being interviewed myself -- if I screw up as a candidate worst thing that can happen is I don't get an offer, if I screw up as an interviewer people other than myself (the candidate, the company) will be affected. There's plenty of sites that talk about how to prepare for being interviewed, candidates spend dozens of hours before going for an interview, but there's less material out there for individual engineers who want to become better interviewers. Joel and Yegge are prominent exceptions, but most other pundits say only the obvious, e.g., "ask questions that can tell you if the candidate can do the job?"