[flimsypremise]

Been interviewing for over a decade. Tests like this do not really tell you whether someone is a good programmer, they tell you whether a person has spent a lot of time practicing problems like this. The only way to tell if someone is good at the job is to have a conversation with them and pay attention to how they answer your questions. Ask your candidate their opinions on API interface design or whether they favor mono-repos. A good candidate will be able to speak legibly and at length about these things. The problem is that in order to judge those responses you also have to be very knowledgeable. So instead we have stupid little tests designed to let interviewers of varying ability screen candidates.

[stickfigure]

I've been interviewing people for more than twice that long. I started with the conversational approach, and it worked poorly. There are too many people that are good at talking about technology but bad at actually doing.

My mature interview style is a pair programming session on a specific exercise (the same for everyone). It's inspired by the "RPI" (Rob's Pairing Interview) from Pivotal (well, Pivotal of old days). There are no gotchas to it, it's not hard. But it's definitely programming. Because that's what I'm hiring for. Not talking.

[sideshowb]

to correctly judge some fizzbuzz solutions (or approaches to refactoring) you would also have to be knowledgeable. Guess what I think the problem is.