Precisely the reason I don't like to focus interviews on language gotchas and semantics. The only exception I made was a quick pre-screen (to be completed in t

Precisely the reason I don't like to focus interviews on language gotchas and semantics. The only exception I made was a quick pre-screen (to be completed in their own time with no pressure) in which candidates received 3 or 4 code snippets, and were asked a couple of questions about them which they wrote answers out in plain English explaining their thought process, in however much detail they wanted. (Thinks like a piece of code where "this" would break because of context, or a cross domain request that would fail and some ways to approach solving). Even then, that was used as a ways to say "ok, this candidate clearly has good understanding, we'll not hang about too long during the interview process on that topic". If they didn't mention what we thought the answer was, it didn't count against them at all, it just gave us an area to explore in the interview. (Because who's to say our pre-screen question wasn't the problem?)