In Defence of the Technical Interview
This is absolutely completely true:<p>"Companies do code testing because they have encountered so many candidates who look good on paper, and may even be able to talk about computers convincingly, but can’t actually write a program when asked. Any program. At all."<p>I interview programmers and I've encountered this a few times, and yet, I still don't do code tests.  I talk to the candidate and you can easily ask the right questions to tell who can code and who can't.  You can even get a judge of experience level (junior, intermediate, senior) which you won't get from a code test.<p>We get a lot of English-as-second-language and shy developers (who <i>can</i> code) and I can still figure out by asking pretty general questions about development.  The idea that you <i>need</i> a code test to figure out who can code and who can't is false.  I'm not arguing against it, I'm simply arguing that it's not strictly <i>necessary</i>.