[Mountain_Skies]

Does the job you're hiring for actually require sorting a list? If Kroger wants to hire a new CEO, they're unlikely to require candidates to walk up to the cash register and ring up customers even if it's a very basic skill for the industry.

[jwestbury]

Out of all the places I've worked, I think my favourite approach was Dropbox's: They ask these algo questions for new grads, because every new grad from a computer science program has been through these classes and it's an easy thing to index on.

But for experienced hires, nobody gets algorithms questions. Instead, you get practical questions -- depending on the role, things like writing an ID allocator, finding duplicate files across a filesystem, demonstrating understanding of concurrency, etc. No "implement this well-understood algorithm that you'll never implement again" questions.