Obviously answering the question: can this person that we're considering hiring to write code, actually write code? Is worthwhile trying to answer. Whether you

Obviously answering the question: can this person that we're considering hiring to write code, actually write code? Is worthwhile trying to answer. Whether you can reasonably do that in a 1-2h interview by asking them to type stuff into a computer, I'm not so sure. I suppose it's a not bad approach but it seems likely to produce false negatives. e.g. candidate may have been working in a non-coding role for the past year and might therefore perform poorly in a coding challenge, but when hired would get back up to speed in a short time. I came from a hardware engineering background, and we had the same concern there: does the candidate know how to design hardware? We didn't ask them to design a circuit in the interview, but somehow it worked out ok to just ask them questions and listen to their answers.