I interviewed at several companies about a year ago, and one had a practice that really stood out. I was impressed by how organized it was, how well it seemed to be a good test of a job candidate, and how it gave me many opportunities to show my qualifications. It was a whole day, but they flew me out and put me up in a nice hotel nearby.

The day was broken up into sessions of about 1 hour each (maybe a bit more). In each session it was me and 3-4 other people, but the people rotated, so I got to meet lots of engineers, a PM or two, the hiring manager, etc., and they all got to meet me. A few people showed up more than once.

The first session was basically an introduction. I think it was shorter than the others. No quiz-style questions, but stuff about my background, etc., and opportunities for me to ask questions also.

Next I did a presentation at the whiteboard describing some project I'd worked on. They had told me this would be a part of the day, so I could have prepared (though I didn't). I talked about my recent startup, describing some of the data model and machine learning tricks I'd developed. They asked lots of questions, some to clarify, others about my reasoning, how it would scale, if I'd considered technology X, etc.

In the next session was me at the whiteboard again, but here they described a new feature they'd like to add to their site, and my job was to sketch out a rough solution. So partially this was about my ability to ask clarification questions, and also about my big-picture design skills. Again they asked lots of questions, and once we even got into a specific SQL query (where I opted to use an EXISTS with a correlated sub-query). So this session seemed a lot like the first, but more impromptu on my part and probably more practiced on theirs.

Then they took the whole team out to lunch at a nice Thai restaurant (~15 devs plus the director of engineering and the PM). This part was relaxing and fun. Of course this was still part of the interview, and wouldn't be relaxing for everyone, but still it was a good way to feel out personality fit for both sides. Also there were too many people for me to be the focus of attention, so that was a nice break.

Finally there was one afternoon session where they gave me a laptop with a toy Rails app, and had me add a feature (change a relationship from one-to-one to one-to-many, or something like that). There were two devs watching me code, and I had to do the whole MVC thing: write a migration, tweak the controller, edit the view. I got to talk through the changes as I did them, so they knew my reasoning. It made me smile to slip in a few fancy vim moves; I don't know if they noticed. But it made me realize this was also a test about some basic mechanics, too. They let me choose my editor/IDE, so it was a chance for them to watch whether I knew my tools.

Then there was a final session for follow-up questions etc. This was fairly short I believe.

All along the way I had lots of opportunities to ask questions of my own, which I appreciated.

There were no puzzles, no trivia quizzes. Personally I'd add a FizzBuzz test to the initial phone screen (like Han Solo "They hardly asked me any questions."), but otherwise I plan to completely rip off this template the next time I hire someone myself. Maybe it can help some of you!