Nobody has convinced me that stressful “challenge” style interviews accurately model the work of software developers. People who do well at them are not necessarily more qualified than people who do poorly at them. Answering interview questions is itself a skill, and being good at it doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be good at the job. Etsy is iterating on how it builds a model of software engineers through the hiring process. Every company should be.
– Rafe Colburn, Interviewing is just a model of employment
I personally am not a huge fan of the ‘stump the candidate’ interviews. Ideally by the time someone has reached the interview level they’ve already shown a capacity to be generally qualified from a skills point of view.
As a goal I like the idea an interview as a model of what regular employment would look like. That makes the interview less of an interview and more of a trial process working on the same types of things that other devs at the company are doing.
Another ideal is to regularly ask yourself, is our hiring process bringing in people who go on to be successful in their roles? As devs we tweak and adjust code all the time, we should be open to doing the same with our interviewing and hiring methods.