[Serplat]

The theory behind it is that material about specific frameworks is easily learned. If a company is looking to hire you, what you currently know matters far less than what you can learn. The best developers are able to master new frameworks in days or weeks, making their current experience near meaningless.

So, instead of testing what you current know, many companies look to evaluate the way you think and your potential to learn. I'm sure that the current methods of doing this aren't perfect, but I think they're a hell of a lot better than asking me minute Hibernate details when I haven't used Hibernate in years.

I currently prefer overall design questions. The type where the interviewer proposes an overarching problem, and you have to design a full system to handle it (not a difficult algorithm necessarily, but the data structures and classes involved). Mix this with a bit of actual coding, and I think the interviewer can get a decent idea of your skills.

[mitchi]

I agree with you. But I'm probably not teaching you anything by saying that mastering important frameworks like :

  - Win32 API  

  - Write device drivers WDM or other 

  - .NET / ASP.NET  

  - Java standard library 

  - Sockets, UNICODE  

  - DOM, HTML, CSS, Javascript

These things take a lot of time to learn properly. You have to read for a long time and know a lot of things. It's not true to say that anyone with algorithm smarts can do this.