2. If you claim SQL: Explain LEFT JOIN ... IS NULL pattern. Do you know about little bobby tables (injection exploit).
3. "How does the internet work?"
4. "Tell me about a hard / interesting / instructive bug you had to handle.
5. What would you do differently if you were the lord high poobah on your last job?
6. Tell me about something you helped finish and ship to users.
7. What do you have to say about OUR product?
Those questions have helped me hire some great people. They apply to anybody from a fresh-out to a self-taught to famous programmers.
You CAN shove into their face some strange line of code that depends on arcana of operator precedence. But the only useful answer there is "I would never write something so obscure."
Or you could have gotten lucky in the pool of candidates you are sampling from. If you end up only interviewing good (or bad) programmers, then your interviewing process never really mattered in the first place. So, no formulaic interview process is going to ever be proven effective (and in fact, is very likely never going to be much more effective than a coin toss). People really need to get over themselves with their "clever" questions and answers.
2. If you claim SQL: Explain LEFT JOIN ... IS NULL pattern. Do you know about little bobby tables (injection exploit).
3. "How does the internet work?"
4. "Tell me about a hard / interesting / instructive bug you had to handle.
5. What would you do differently if you were the lord high poobah on your last job?
6. Tell me about something you helped finish and ship to users.
7. What do you have to say about OUR product?
Those questions have helped me hire some great people. They apply to anybody from a fresh-out to a self-taught to famous programmers.
You CAN shove into their face some strange line of code that depends on arcana of operator precedence. But the only useful answer there is "I would never write something so obscure."