If a candidate is nervous, the interviewer should relax him. Start with a really really easy question. The interviewer should adapt to the candidate. But a can

If a candidate is nervous, the interviewer should relax him. Start with a really really easy question. The interviewer should adapt to the candidate. But a candidate is going to have to bend himself somewhat towards a company. If hired, adopt their coding standards, source control, and bug reporting systems, at least. A candidate who refuses to bend at all during the interview process is a big danger sign. Asking someone to code for a non-coding position is dumb. Asking someone to code on a piece of paper is not. The interviewer should be forgiving of silly syntax mistakes, of course. If you can't remember the order of arguments to strstr(), that's okay. If you don't know strstr() exists, that's a problem.