I think part of the problem is that the technical grilling isn't necessarily reducing false positives after a certain point. You may simply be selecting people

I think part of the problem is that the technical grilling isn't necessarily reducing false positives after a certain point. You may simply be selecting people who have front-loaded data structures in an "exam ready" way and rejecting candidates who have a fine background in this area but aren't exam ready. Do you really reduce false negatives by doing this? I almost have to wonder if you increase them, since you may simply be selecting for people who know how to prepare for an interview (and who aren't so busy with important work that they can afford to drop everything to front load the information). Think of it like this - you have two candidates. The first is exam ready for data structures and algorithms. You want merge sort? He whips out mergesort. You want red-black trees? You got it. A second candidate is clearly aware of what run time is, and what trade-offs happen in different sorting algorithms. He's clearly aware of what can happen when a binary tree gets out of balance, and is aware of the types of more balanced trees. However, his knowledge is not exam ready. He can clearly code, but he starts to fade on the edge cases and in the implementation details. He mentions the chapter in a well respected data structures and algorithms book he'd read should this issue come up. My question is, do you really protect yourself against false negatives with a no-hire on candidate #2? Candidate #1 may simply be someone who has figured out how to hack the programming interview. He might not be an especially good developer, not especially good at working with clients, with teams, with pushing through and getting it done. Or he might be very good at this. I'm just saying that I doubt that being "exam ready" is much of an indicator beyond the obvious coding ability and awareness of candidate #2. However, this process clearly creates a huge number of false negatives - by bouncing #2, there's an excellent chance that you're passing on a superb candidate, and for what? A reduction in false positives that may be close to zero? One thing - I think part of the disagreement on this board may come from the different definition people have for intensely technical interviews. Some would consider #2 to have passed. My own experience is that interviewers often do expect an "exam ready" preparation on data structures and algorithms, in addition to a few other branches of computing, which is probably I take a more cynical view of these interviews.