I also worked for a company once who had several enthousiastic , seemingly bright people with somewhat limited experience come in for interviews, but they didn't make the cut because they didn't pass some coding challenges. The guy who did get hired went to a good school and was a good coder, but was way too arrogant, difficult to work with and repeatedly refused to do what his manager asked him to work on. And how did that guy interview other candidates? He screened them by their education, and when they would come in he would give them one programming challenge without asking any other questions. Nobody seemed to realize that there were big problems with the company's hiring strategies and that developers themselves were largely to blame for that.