I'm curious about what is meant by the elimination of "brain teasers." Could it be that the brain teaser has just shifted to code questions? Part of the challe

I'm curious about what is meant by the elimination of "brain teasers." Could it be that the brain teaser has just shifted to code questions? Part of the challenge of a technical interview is to get at someone's coding ability without resorting to what are essentially brain teasers disguised as computer science questions - and I'd expect a lot of disagreement around where you draw that line. Here are a few I've been asked: - Print out the fibonacci sequence recursively. - Print all permutations of a string (using recursion). - Swap two integers without creating a third integer. - Out of several million database entries, select a few at random to display to the user. Don't repeat any until they've all been displayed. - Implement mergesort, code a singleton, print a binary tree in order, add a branch, find a cycle in a linked list... Which of these would you consider brain teasers, if any? I'd say the "swap two integers" is the closest... but if you're including a lot of these questions, are you still in brain teaser land? I'd love to see some google data on what types of technical questions correlate with job performance, rather than simple "brain teasers".