The best jobs I've had in my career, by far, were with the places where the interview consisted of sitting down and talking. In fact, one notable one, I was interviewing with the founder (this was my first startup though back then they were just called small businesses, and this was just a fast growing small business). We talked about stuff, including technical stuff, some problems I'd worked on, etc. Not only did he not ask me to write any code, ever, nor had they seen any code of mine, but by the end of the interview he told me they were going to make an offer. The thing is, this was my first real interview, and my first interview for a full time programming position. I'd written software part time, but had been pursuing physics as my field previous to this. So, it couldn't have been that I was a good interviewer... I had no skill at that point.
They were so happy with me after the first year they gave me a %40 raise.
Meanwhile the worst, most excruciating, took all day and I didn't get the chance to have lunch I was promised, interview where I met with 9-11 (I lost count actually) people, and had to write code for every single one of them, ended up also being for the company that was the worst to work for, where I was surrounded by mediocre programmers and the management was absolutely incompetant.
I think if I made a graph with one axis being the amount of programming required in the interview process, and the amount of suckage at the job in the other, those experiences would show correlation.
Anecdotal of course, and I have theories as to why, but that's been my experience.
They were so happy with me after the first year they gave me a %40 raise.
Meanwhile the worst, most excruciating, took all day and I didn't get the chance to have lunch I was promised, interview where I met with 9-11 (I lost count actually) people, and had to write code for every single one of them, ended up also being for the company that was the worst to work for, where I was surrounded by mediocre programmers and the management was absolutely incompetant.
I think if I made a graph with one axis being the amount of programming required in the interview process, and the amount of suckage at the job in the other, those experiences would show correlation.
Anecdotal of course, and I have theories as to why, but that's been my experience.