I agree. I interviewed people who optimized for white boarding interviewed and, as such, could knock up CS algorithms which you can trivially import from librar

I agree. I interviewed people who optimized for white boarding interviewed and, as such, could knock up CS algorithms which you can trivially import from libraries all I wanted. But when asking them a problem they did not encounter before and Google, they got very stuck. While, every time, there was a way of writing the query to Google that had the answer in the top 3 (usually #1). People waste crazy time on reinventing the wheel. Anecdotal: we had some problem to solve which required qua a lot of code to solve and only old sites with broken links came up in Google for the guy solving it so he decided to implement it himself. When I asked why that task was taking so long he showed me what he was implementing. The code he was writing had an implementation on an old site which had a broken link to the code; when I copied the name of the zip file that was linked in github; there was the code. It had no description or comments; someone just checked it in. It was not perfect code, but it shaved off a few days of writing it from scratch anyway. I care about being able to code, which can be assessed from past code and a pair programming session and then efficient problem solving using your brain and internet. The latter is somehow less common. So my favorite way now is; I ask them to 'solve' a problem they have never encountered and that cannot physically be done during the interview time (I am interviewing for software development and in our field you get asked for things that cannot be done in the time you are asked to do it all the time, so I need to see how you handle that); give them time to Google possible ways to do it and present a little plan. Then they need to pick, out of the plan, something they think they can do inside the interview time (see how confident they are and if they have any sense about low hanging fruit or estimations; I might suggest something else if the task they pick is only installing libraries for an hour ;) and we'll sit together behind a monitor and do it together. I'll usually tell them to stop after 15-30 minutes as I have seen enough at that time.