Here's what I've been doing. I'm running on an egregiously small sample size right now, but so far, so good.
My goal is to answer "Are you honest about what you know, excited and curious about what you don't, willing and able to learn, and driven to excel at the role that we're discussing?" Sometimes answering this requires code, but generally not a whole lot, and mostly I just use it to tease out where someone actually is vs. where they say they are. I don't want to hire a candidate who is best suited to make my problems go away tomorrow. I want, a year or three down the line, to say I built the best team possible.
Maybe I can say this because I don't think the "technical" part of what we're doing is the major challenge, though I think that most engineering teams are actually in the same boat as us. Google has far different problems than we do, so their hiring process is rightfully different than ours. And maybe I'm just getting it all wrong. We'll see what happens.
My goal is to answer "Are you honest about what you know, excited and curious about what you don't, willing and able to learn, and driven to excel at the role that we're discussing?" Sometimes answering this requires code, but generally not a whole lot, and mostly I just use it to tease out where someone actually is vs. where they say they are. I don't want to hire a candidate who is best suited to make my problems go away tomorrow. I want, a year or three down the line, to say I built the best team possible.
Maybe I can say this because I don't think the "technical" part of what we're doing is the major challenge, though I think that most engineering teams are actually in the same boat as us. Google has far different problems than we do, so their hiring process is rightfully different than ours. And maybe I'm just getting it all wrong. We'll see what happens.