I'm in a school of thought that algo interviews are useful, but not for the knowledge of some particular algorithm. I was usually asking people to write atoi()

I'm in a school of thought that algo interviews are useful, but not for the knowledge of some particular algorithm. I was usually asking people to write atoi() implementation without using high-level constructs on the whiteboard, piece of paper or in the browser window. Things I was looking for: 1. If I'm interviewing for C# position and a person chooses VB.NET, that's probably a red flag. 2. If they choose C, hey! show me your pointers arithmetic, strlen() at the beginning of the loop is a huge red flag. 3. There're always giveaways about how person is familiar with the language (and mind you, I do not expect any tricky stuff to be used). But the important part is not the code - the important part is to watch how the person attacks this token problem, how much time do they spend on it, where they're when I come back in the room. Then we'll talk about what the did in order to solve the problem and why did they do things they did. I won't be running this problem to check if the output is correct or to see if it compiles at all - we'll just talk it over. Will we talk about technology stack in use at the company, assess person's architectural skills? We sure will. But at the end of the day I'll expect this person to write some code at their job and I need to be sure that they know what they are doing. Does Github account help? It does to a degree. I'll sure take a peek to see at the coding style or how the projects/code are structured, but honestly, I just don't have time to fully assess someone's capabilities by reading their existing code thoroughly. Plus, it doesn't give me any clues on the thought process when they were writing that code.