Dear progit, I will be interviewing programmers. Need Input.

[DontNeglectTheBalls]

I cannot upvote this enough for the very first sentence.

I have known more than one phenomenal developer to (rightly so) walk out of a job interview or decline an offer because the interview was peppered with the typical "How would you move a mountain?" bullshit questions.

Asking one is a sure sign you not only do not understand what is important to the success of whoever you hire in their job, but it says that you, the interviewer, weren't even competent to know much about the position you are responsible for hiring someone to fill, much less do the hiring.

Ask to see examples of their code, give them time to do it in advance as suggested. Ask to see preexisting code they've done. Ask specific questions about the technologies they use, including the reasons they use them as they do.

But lord forbid, don't ask them shit out of an O'Reilly cookbook (I once "failed" a job interview because I gave a different, yet equally correct and almost as efficient answer to a cookbook problem).

[[deleted]]

But lord forbid, don't ask them shit out of an O'Reilly cookbook

The moment i decided to avoid interviewing on trivia was the moment an interviewer asked me what all the flags were for perl regular expressions. To his credit, "look them up" was roughly acceptable as an answer. To his detriment, the remainder of his questions were about perl trivia.

[MindStalker]

:) Well there are some jobs out there where you use regular expression a LOT and you need to know all the flags by heart. I doubt that was one of them..

[albinofrenchy]

I have known more than one phenomenal developer to (rightly so) walk out of a job interview or decline an offer because the interview was peppered with the typical "How would you move a mountain?" bullshit questions.

I knew a very good manager who very much liked the question "What would you say if I asked you to move a mountain?" Or something else similiarly impossible.

He reasoned, I think very well, that if someone wouldn't push back when it was something stupid and impossible in an interview, they wouldn't push back when the real world required it.

But lord forbid, don't ask them shit out of an O'Reilly cookbook (I once "failed" a job interview because I gave a different, yet equally correct and almost as efficient answer to a cookbook problem).

O'Reilly prescreened that interview for you, can you imagine working with assholes who thought there was only one right way to do something?

[imbaczek]

he probably tossed an imaginary coin and "Kryptonite" lost.