I made a post on HN a couple of weeks ago basically saying the same thing. It can be rather frustrating to be asked questions with seemingly no relevance to th

I made a post on HN a couple of weeks ago basically saying the same thing. It can be rather frustrating to be asked questions with seemingly no relevance to the actual position. I understand what they're going for though - the companies that do it correctly are looking at the candidates thought process through a challenging situation. While I think it's important to figure this out, I believe it's more important to know how well the candidate can do the actual job, that of sitting down and writing quality software. Brainteasers and writing modified sorting algorithms won't get this (unless the company is in the sort algorithm business I suppose) but having the candidate write code which could actually be used in the job would.