Personally I think there are two good ways, in combination, to determining if a person is a good hire.
1. Ask questions about past projects. Probing questions to make sure their resume sounds accurate. Get a sense for how they solved problems in the past and explain them.
2. Give them something to code. On a computer. Some small example. Even better if you can try a pair programming exercise to see how they code and how they can communicate with others on a team.
Asking academic questions has been entirely useless in my opinion. I've worked with multiple people who can pass all the academic questions about algorithms and data set and couldn't write an application to save their live...and the vice versa too. I'd rather see how they can code, now and how they can communicate about projects (active and in the past).
1. Ask questions about past projects. Probing questions to make sure their resume sounds accurate. Get a sense for how they solved problems in the past and explain them.
2. Give them something to code. On a computer. Some small example. Even better if you can try a pair programming exercise to see how they code and how they can communicate with others on a team.
Asking academic questions has been entirely useless in my opinion. I've worked with multiple people who can pass all the academic questions about algorithms and data set and couldn't write an application to save their live...and the vice versa too. I'd rather see how they can code, now and how they can communicate about projects (active and in the past).