How to Interview A Programmer?

I've been on both sides of job interviews for technical positions. I've seen both success and failure (on both sides: my own success rate is currently at around 2/3, where I count a job that I left after 2 months as a failure). This isn't the definitive guide to running an interview, or to being interviewed, but it's a good guide to what interviewers should be looking for. As a result, it's also a good guide to what interviewees can assume interviewers are looking for. How meta!

Bear the Goal in Mind

The goal of an interview is to find out—often in only an hour or so—whether you could work with the person you're talking to daily without one of the two of you going insane. Some people phrase this as whether you could spend 8 hours trapped in an airport with just the interviewee to talk to. Imagine that, but 5 days a week for the next 2 years.

Find out enough about their technical skills to decide whether they were lying...