[VBprogrammer]

I understand where you are coming from but personally I believe that asking a programmer to produce a small amount of code is certainly relevant.

Don't get me wrong, it would be possible to pick nearly worthless questions which prove nothing about a candidate but a well designed problem requiring a few dozen lines of code and no 'trick' or specific knowledge can tell you more about an applicant than many hours of trying to code on a white-board or doing silly logic puzzles.