Responding to this thread in general.

One risk of questions like these is that they lead you to candidates
who are clones of yourself - who know the same things, who agree with
you, who have the same experiences.

Since we all know that we are the best programmers in the world, we
may not see this as a problem. However, hiring clones of me is the
mono-culture risk - if we all approach problems the same, how are we
to approach problems in different ways?

In addition, we never know how the people we didn't hire would have
worked out - would they have contributed something different? Could
they have quickly picked up the trivia that they missed in the
interview? Did we miss a brilliant programmer because they didn't
think well in the interview and froze up on the "abstract class versus
interface" questions? Were they a great problem solver who didn't
think the same as I do? There is an unmeasurable opportunity cost to
the people we don't hire - did we miss something that would add to the
team.

In general, some of my best hires wouldn't have answered all of the
questions posed here correctly. ( of course, they wouldn't have BSed
me, either) The current brilliant programmer I work with is self
taught and was working in a car dealership before we hired him. Did
he know all of this stuff? No. Has he learned it? some of it - the
rest he know who to ask and where to look it up.

Who is more useful - the person who can quote GoF patterns or the
person who rediscovered a pattern on her own and calls it by a
different name?

Food for thought.

Doc