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I think most experienced people would agree that a technical interview could be appropriate for someone with 0-5 years of work experience.

For somebody with 10+ years of experience, who you can find that talks the talk during a real interview, CS101-level quizzes are insulting and inappropriate.



I have worked with people who have 10+ years of experience and can talk the talk, but are still pretty bad at the day-to-day work of writing software. I also have worked with some great developers who aren't so good at interview-style conversations.

I agree CS quizzes are a bad interview technique, which is why I favor pair programming. But I've never had a good candidate feel insulted by asking to sit down and code together for a while. Indeed, the #1 thing good programmers have in common is they like programming.


IME it's not about asking easy questions, it's about asking questions about "programming in the small" that are relevant to day-to-day work. I conduct lots of technical interviews and I've found that it's just as important to ask the 10+ year veterans about the fundamentals as it is to ask the new grads. It's just way too easy to talk about programming while actually being incompetent at it. Only by having a candidate write real code can an interviewer detect the difference.




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