I do not think the Author is a complete poseur, so asking him to leave the hall would not be 100% correct solution. He seemed to have some project management experience. However there is a problem with him that I cannot put my finger on (or an appropriate place). No programmer in his right (or left one for that matter) mind can believe that a "programming test" during an interview would provide any meaningful indicator about a coder's abilities. Maybe you can ask the difference between SET versus SELECT and INSERT, but the answer would show the philosophical position of candidate at best. He can say that SET is a three letter command and others are six letter (thus inefficient :) ) commands, that there is a need for a four letter command in between.... He would be right. He can talk about the differences between utilization of read and write pipes amongst those commands and he would be right again. If I were to answer I would talk about offloading some CPU tasks from application server to database server and I would be right too. However a programming test, to see if a programmer can code, especially if you are looking for a possible "cowboy" (which is more suitable to the case than "rock star" I assume) is absurd. It is like claiming that there are already people in staff who can evaluate the code from such people... It would be more likely a case of "You are not expected to understand this", if candidate is really a good programmer. My Assembly instructor used to tell us that "no good programmer can understand their code after a year"...