[initram]

Nobody's saying you can't test their ability to program. You can ask questions about programming without having them solve some problem from freshman data structures class. You can ask them how they do their current job, and ask for specifics about code they've written. You can ask them to review pieces of code to see how they would improve or change them. You can ask them for a code sample, and then have them walk you through it to be sure they understand it as well. There are many other less insulting options that still give you the chance to "hear the musician play." As an analogy, you probably wouldn't hire Wynton Marsalis and ask him to play "Happy Birthday" in an interview. You would probably ask for some samples of his music, or links to videos of him playing, etc.

[NotSammyHagar]

Thanks for responding. So what is insulting about specifically asking for coding? It is not that different than asking someone to look at code at the interview and asking for comments. We do both things at my company. I am not persuaded by the famous musician example, think of someone trying out that you haven't seen play. Someone famous who is active and say not recently suffered an accident is in a different category.

We interviewed some experienced people who did terrible in the in-person interview. So we tried giving experienced people a pre-interview question, that maybe took a couple of hours of focused effort. The idea was the people who couldn't do it great during that instant could sit down in their preferred environment and code something up and take their time.Some people did better with this. I personally hate pre-interview questions, so I argued against it but we still tried it.

I find the code review of bad code too easy, not persuasive. Is it a bad idea for a service to hand out ids that are memory locations of runtime structures, and take them back? Obviously, but a surprising number of people don't see that, including experienced people.