I agree, and feel it's also irrelevant for what this could possibly tell me about a candidate as far as interview questions go. You're totally right, it just do

I agree, and feel it's also irrelevant for what this could possibly tell me about a candidate as far as interview questions go. You're totally right, it just doesn't mean that someone doing these wrong things in the interview setting gives you really any bits of info at all about whether they would be good or bad in a real job setting. Absolutely none. Great programmers who would never do such unnecessary things when programming in a real situation may nonetheless think of them and do them when in an interview situation, since the kinds of situations are so incompatibly different. I guess if they did this in a take-home assignment, then it might be evidence of something. In an in-person coding interview though, it's just not useful at all for forming opinions about the candidate. I've even seen veteran programmers with greatly successful open source projects, lots of experience, good education, high level of intellectual independence and curiosity, excellent writing skill, etc. etc., give highly inefficient implementations of FizzBuzz during an in-person interview. These interviews are just not at all related to the way human beings actually write code and work in real life, and so they just cannot tell you much.