I&#x27;ve been doing a little interviewing at my company, hiring engineers. I tend to avoid the pop quiz questions because I, having been asked them in interviews before, can&#x27;t imagine they&#x27;re that valuable, and, considering our field has plenty of introverts and autism spectrum-types, it&#x27;s probably not representative of their abilities in a real work environment.<p>HOWEVER. One candidate had a PhD and was very agreeable, had lots of experience in other companies in our field. So I skipped the programming test, since I figured a PhD with loads of experience <i>must</i> be able to code...<p>A colleague of mine saw the candidate as they were leaving and ducked. I asked them why. &quot;Well, I personally lead to them getting fired a few jobs ago.&quot; Turns out Colleague worked very closely with Candidate and Candidate can&#x27;t code worth shit: Colleague ended up personally redoing a ton of Candidate&#x27;s botched work, Boss noticed Colleague working way late for no good reason, and after several chances, had to let Candidate go since they couldn&#x27;t do their job.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;ve come to the conclusion that I need to ask in-depth technical problems, but I&#x27;ll phrase it like this: &quot;I&#x27;d like you to describe an A* path-finding algorithm the best way you can (pseudocode, diagrams, assembly, whatever). I&#x27;m not looking for a &#x27;correct&#x27; answer, or syntax or class diagrams. I want to watch how you solve problems of which you only have a vague knowledge. If you&#x27;d like to refer to some resource, feel free to ask, and I&#x27;ll tell you if I know, or I&#x27;ll find out.&quot;<p>I suspect this is the point of the technical question, but it&#x27;s hard to tell what interviewers actually want.