I HATE interview questions that ask the candidate to write some trivial piece of code. Particularly the ones that need to be written in C to give an optimal ans

I HATE interview questions that ask the candidate to write some trivial piece of code. Particularly the ones that need to be written in C to give an optimal answer "if you just do pointer math, this would be trivial..." Not to say that some good candidates won't be excellent at C coding, but these problems often test for specific knowledge, when they should be screening for critical thinking skills. I've seen candidates who were "good" at this sort of problem (probably because it was on a CS homework in College), but didn't have much in the way of critical reasoning skills. I prefer asking questions that require them to devise some sort of algorithm to solve a problem (typically by walking through the situation methodically), and then implement that algorithm in the language of their choice. No real ahas or tricks, and I don't care if you write it in Python or Assembler...