Maybe you should accept that not everybody knows everything.  Your questions are nice to impress your geek buddies but do they really help you to deliver quality?<p>So what they use ORM instead of raw SQL? Your role as interviewer is to figure out if they would be able to learn.  I can almost see your ads: 5 years of OOP with design patterns, 5 years of MySQL database, 3 years of API, etc.<p>How about you try to figure out if they can learn?  A few months ago, I interviewed a junior guy.  We were looking at a simple code exercise he did before coming in.  I asked &quot;Why did you lose a List here?&quot; &quot;I don&#x27;t know, I needed a collection&quot; &quot;Do you know how List is implemented?&quot; &quot;No&quot;. I spend a couple minute explaining about singly-linked Lists, and ask &quot;Now that you know, would you use it again?&quot; &quot;No, cause it&#x27;s terrible for append operations&quot;.<p>He didn&#x27;t know,  but I explained and he understood alone.  Why don&#x27;t you try to explain and see if they can come to conclusions?