Well, you can’t give people stuff to do offline because they cheat (you’ll see the whole thing show up in no time as a Stack Overflow question). And you can’t

Well, you can’t give people stuff to do offline because they cheat (you’ll see the whole thing show up in no time as a Stack Overflow question). And you can’t avoid coding questions during interviews because it is astounding how much people lie on résumés; seriously, even people who describe their background as “Advanced Knowledge of $LANGUAGE”, can choke when asked to do the most trivial things in $LANGUAGE. I try to ask questions that aren’t completely ridiculous, but definite tests of knowledge. And in my mind I judge correctness not so much on remembering obscure syntax but on how they approached the problem, and how much time it seemed to take them to start doing something. I always ask about things like how they approach debugging, testing, etc. because these are important too and they tell you a lot about how likely the person is to be able to handle any problem you come up with.