If there is one thing around hiring programmers that I wish had more discussion, it's the notion from the interviewer's goal of "trying to understand how one th

If there is one thing around hiring programmers that I wish had more discussion, it's the notion from the interviewer's goal of "trying to understand how one thinks about a problem." Frankly, I don't think we're very good at it. And for good reason -- it's really hard. My personal experience has been that most of us in the industry aren't well equipped to make that determination reliably among each other. The most successful interviewees I've ever seen are those with excellent pattern recognition and recall. Only a few of those are decent programmers (not even excellent.) But they're all very talented in describing ways of thinking. In spite of information at hand, I rarely see those in hiring roles ever go away from "does this person think about this the way I do?" It is a very subjective task, so I don't fault those in these positions for following that process. But I think there's a perception in "understanding how a person thinks about a problem" that is flawed.