[RedGreenCode]

Gayle Laakmann McDowell has a good Quora answer on the pros and cons of tech inteviews:

http://www.quora.com/Why-are-programmers-in-the-software-eng...

It's worth reading the whole thing, but here's a summary of why alternative interview techniques have their own problems:

* Testing for specific technology knowledge excludes good programmers who don’t happen to know that technology.

* Asking someone to explain their past projects is biased towards people who can explain effectively, not necessarily people who can do the work.

* Giving candidates a homework problem has several drawbacks: they may have someone else do the work for them; it is biased towards candidates with more free time; and because it requires negligible time for a company to send off a canned assignment, but potentially a lot of time for the candidate to complete it, it can be unfair to candidates.

* Having candidates work on a real project for one day makes it difficult to focus on characteristics that distinguish great programmers from good or mediocre ones, since real projects have a lot of simple tasks that almost any programmer can handle.

* Letting candidates use a computer during the interview can cause them to focus on syntax rather than problem-solving.

Basically, although many people hate the coding interview, there's no good alternative.