[whoops1122]

The most beautiful and elegant part of coding is the logic, Not how to use a for loop. Anything question that can be answered with google should be forbid from a interview test. show him a method, ask him how he can improve the performance. ask him a opinion based question on OO design.

if you hiring a house builder u would not ask him what a brick looks like right?

[empath75]

Yeah, but if your have to get through 100 house builder interviews and half of them don't know what a brick is, it saves a lot of time, no?

[bmj]

if you hiring a house builder u would not ask him what a brick looks like right?

The problem with this is that a home builder/contractor will have a long list of references, and possibly examples of her work available for examination. Many engineers search for jobs while still employed, so they generally don't include as references co-workers and current managers. Further, if your employer doesn't allow you to open source your work, then you need to do open side projects to have any sort of real resume prospective employers can examine (and this is problematic since your day job may already take more than 40 hours of your time).

So, no, I don't need to ask a contractor if he knows what a brick looks like, but I do need to look at his references, look him on Angie's List, post to local message boards about his work. And, of course, I'm not an expert on home building, so it would be unreasonable to ask him questions about carpentry or framing.

[CobrastanJorji]

I see where you're going, and I generally agree with you, but I think that every programmer should at least be able to FizzBuzz, just as every architect or master home builder should be able to answer the question "which one of these is a brick?"

[zzzcpan]

I think there is no point in assessing anything that doesn't take years to learn. And it's fairly easy for any team to come up with some fundamentals, that a candidate should know. There are more important qualities, than knowledge, though, as google-funded research suggests, like empathy.