[Scotsman]

It has been becoming more and more common in engineering interviews to ask prospects to solve some programming problem during the interview and observe how they go about doing so. While I've been guilty of employing this technique myself, recently I have been given cause to wonder if it is really a good technique.

Consider any prospect is going to be nervous coming into an interview, as many engineers are also introverted this is only magnified by the issues of meeting new people for the first time. Thus the situation becomes more akin to holding a gun to someones head and asking them to solve the riddle of the sphinx.

As a result what is really being tested is how well a prospect can think under extreme circumstances, not their actual skill for a given task.

Just speaking for myself, I am starting to think that a better approach is if I have questions if a prospect can actually write code (i.e. fresh out of college, not someone who has several demonstrable applications already in the market) would be to send a short quiz to be completed and returned prior to scheduling the interview. Then in the interview itself focus on general concepts related to the specific duties to be performed (i.e. internet protocols, compression techniques, image interpolation methods, etc).