An algorithms question proves today what it proved 15 years ago: that the candidate learned the algorithm. It does not and never did prove that the candidate sp

An algorithms question proves today what it proved 15 years ago: that the candidate learned the algorithm. It does not and never did prove that the candidate spontaneously generated the solution in the interview. In other words, it isn’t an intelligence test. It isn’t even a programming aptitude test, but it is a conscientiousness test because the candidate went to the trouble of learning many algorithms successfully. That does count for something, but not necessarily what the interviewers expect. If you want to test for programming aptitude, give the candidate a realistic but difficult real world problem and let them solve it in an IDE.