[exratione]

I just wrote up some thoughts on the topic:

https://www.exratione.com/2017/10/in-search-of-the-spark-whe...

Essentially, the question asked is just the setup to watch someone approach a novel experience. If the candidate is not in a natural environment, i.e. working with a comfortable IDE and with access to Stack Overflow, it is kind of pointless. You want to see what they do in a situation fairly close to the mundane daily example of "how do I do this new thing."

So don't ask standard related to business challenges that have answers online: find novel exercises. Write a sort function that sorts everything except for at least two items. Write a linked list node that sabotages the user in the most subtle way possible. And so on. Fortunately these are easy to create, as there is an infinite space of engineering exercises that no-one would carry out in reality as they are self-defeating, or pointlessly destructive, or otherwise non-productive. But they still serve to illustrate how someone thinks their way around a new concept, and that is the important thing.