I have interviewed hundreds of scientists-engineers-developers, and I never use esoteric quiz questions or logic riddles.
I want to screen people for the skills that they will really need in their daily lives, so that's where I draw my pool of questions from. For example, processing data in the most simple ways (sorting, searching, extracting) quickly reveals if the candidates have actually _done_ what they claim they did. You'd be surprised how many Oxford PhDs struggle to write done a pipeline for extracting a simple word frequency list.
Now you might say "Maybe they're Windows people, or prefer Python." and my response is "I don't mind what tools you use - but you need to demonstrate that you can solve easy/common tasks on the spot, without wasting have a calendar day to re-invent the wheel."
I want to screen people for the skills that they will really need in their daily lives, so that's where I draw my pool of questions from. For example, processing data in the most simple ways (sorting, searching, extracting) quickly reveals if the candidates have actually _done_ what they claim they did. You'd be surprised how many Oxford PhDs struggle to write done a pipeline for extracting a simple word frequency list.
Now you might say "Maybe they're Windows people, or prefer Python." and my response is "I don't mind what tools you use - but you need to demonstrate that you can solve easy/common tasks on the spot, without wasting have a calendar day to re-invent the wheel."