I would offer to the interviewee to choose the type of interview. One would prefer to speak (whiteboard), another would like to solve a problem using the computer, yet another would prefer test on paper.
I think the most important part would be to recognize the personality of the interviewee and offer the best way to test his/her knowledge accordingly. When a position requires a specific personality then this wouldn't be the way of course. But most of the time wide range of personalities are acceptable.
Degree requirement.
The mind game quizzes and replacing it with small 1- 2 day projects, spec'd out or not, that showcases the devs day to day skills. I had one interview where I had to find an open GitHub issue on an open source project, provide a fix and create a pull request. A great way to showcase coding methods, style, and problem-solving.
As others mentioned it too, stupid quizzes. I applied for a job as a PHP developer and at the interview after a brief talk, interviewers gave a pen and a piece of paper and asked me to write a code to count a specific letter in a long string without using RegEx, loops and builtin PHP string functions. I simply left the paper untouched and rejected to go for a secondary interview.
Another thing that really bothers me is the rating question.
- In the scale of 0 to 10, what would you rate yourself as a PHP developer?
And no matter how you react to this question, the ball is always in the interviewer's yard. If you say 9 or 10, they'd be like okay congratulations!, we've found the next Fabien Potencier! And if you say 6 or 7, they say so why would you expect us to hire you?
Ow an purely from the interviewee side: it would also really help if they're not in the middle of the workday.
Probably not realistic as interviewers also have a life (or do have a life)...
Almost everybody hates whiteboard coding rounds, they don't asses the skills of a candidate properly..
Coding Challenges on the spot and much quicker process for a developer job. For me, sometimes I get the blank mind due to stress and pressure build up, I can work through it but It just causes anxiety when thinking about what are they going to put me through?
Instead of an interview, I will recommend the "interviewer" to research the github profile of the candidate. Usually, there will be so many repos. But at-least the pinned repos give an insight on what the candidate is working on. If the interviewer likes the github profile, then they should recommend the hiring manager to do a "fitness" interview and hire / reject the candidate.
Depends heavily on culture, but there should be some way to know the salary range early, which'd get narrower after each round.
apoorv barwa
Technology enthusiast And Web Developer
I find syntax related questions really dumb. I think as developers we should focus on how a person approaches a problem rather than if he has good syntactical knowledge of one language. I may be pointing towards a more algorithmic approach but i too hate questions like the one pointed out by Ehsan Fazeli. And yes the also the How you rate yourself question. The GitHub approach is nice but even if a person is not very much active on Github we can still get a better idea of a persons grasp on particular concepts without asking them trivial questions.