I have been in my fair share of interviews over the lifetime of my professional career and I have always felt the onsite interview process is a poor way to hire people.

I have never found the trick questions or small onsite coding assessments valuable.

For one, trick questions are silly. They are just an old tactic from the early days to try to separate out the left brainers from the rest of the pack.Even Google has admitted it doesn’t make any difference and is a waste of time.

Q. Other insights from the studies you’ve already done?

A. On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.

Second, judging someones skill cannot be measured by putting someone in a room and forcing them to solve a problem without any context, preparation or understanding of what they are trying to solve.

Is this how we solve problems normally at our job? I do not believe so.

This is why I’ve moved towards a better and more personal approach to proving out which candidates are a perfect fit: spending time with them doing some pair programming. It feels more natural and it’s how we normally work. Why are people so scared to use this method?

One of my best guesses is the time required to go into it. But if you think about it, making a poor hiring decision can cost you a lot more in the long run in both time and money especially if you are a young bootstrapped startup.