I'm sympathetic to this - I don't have a CS degree and most of my last jobs have been through references from people I've worked with before, so I haven't had t

I'm sympathetic to this - I don't have a CS degree and most of my last jobs have been through references from people I've worked with before, so I haven't had to answer any tough programming questions in an interview in quite a while. I'm sure if I tried to interview at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc, it would be a little tough for me. At the same time - any reasonably experienced developer should be able to whiteboard something as simple as fizzbuzz without a problem. The more complex the problems, the more you worry about the whiteboard effect, but you should be able to at least walk through your thought process and come up with some reasonable attempt. Having a candidate build something outside of the interview process probably isn't bad (as long as you follow up by going through the code with them), but I think something like a blog application is both too big (unless you really constrain the feature set) and too simple to work in some cases. Something that requires a bit more thought and a bit less time would be better, IMHO.