Yup, here's me disagreeing. I do interviews on occasion and I usually ask for some source on the whiteboard. Generally I only do that with people interviewing

Yup, here's me disagreeing. I do interviews on occasion and I usually ask for some source on the whiteboard. Generally I only do that with people interviewing for junior positions, though. I usually ask for a quick implementation of the fibonacci algo in their favorite language. I also tell them that sloppy is OK - so brace placements, etc are not relevant. I hardly think it's too much to ask for a candidate to implement a simple, standard algo in their language of choice on paper/whiteboard. PHP programmers tend to do very poorly in this area, unless they are programmers who also do PHP. The problem to me seems to be that the PHP environment doesn't encourage experimentation with algorithms, data structures and low-level optimization. Add to that the more-or-less haphazard manner in which most PHP code is organized and you've got a scripter who'll freeze when asked to do a piece of mathematics on paper in their language. Also, most PHP programmers tend to be framework-users. And while using frameworks is good, using frameworks without automating elements of your problem domain (by creating your own little framework-on-a-framework) is generally bad because you end up repeating yourself a lot. PHP is not a bad language, but it's a very, very bad language to have as your sole programming experience.