Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes. My experience of hiring is that it is extremely hard and imprecise. I prefer to give the candidates every advantage possible. Yes, I agree that hiring is hard and imprecise. I generally try to ask questions on a variety of different topics, to make sure that I can find where their strengths are; if they are weak in one or two areas, that can generally be worked around, but if they come off weak in 3 or more of…
I'm curious how long your screen generally lasts. In my hour-long phone screens there's barely enough time to cover a coding question and a few basic data structures/knowledge questions. I feel like covering everything you laid out would take several hours.
I usually have the final question, writing real working code, be something that the candidate does offline using a real editor and being able to test it out, and email me the result afterwards, as we're usually low on time by that point and many people are more comfortable doing that in a real editor, being able to test out their code, etc. However, it turns out that the last question can be done as a one-liner shell script (it has one little tricky bit that make the simplest one liner shell script you might write not quite work properly, but it's possible to work around that), so some people are able to just do that online with me during the screen.
I generally keep the screen moving quickly, giving people prompts and hints to get past parts they're stuck on to keep things moving, and when I say I'm asking basic questions, they are really quite basic. My experience has been that people who actually pass the screen generally complete it within the hour, while people who are struggling are the ones who take longer.