Completely agree. I once had somebody ask me during an interview to write a binary search on the white board. Very tough in that circumstance for me, completely

Completely agree. I once had somebody ask me during an interview to write a binary search on the white board. Very tough in that circumstance for me, completely blew it. Interestingly that was 11 years ago, I am now the chief architect and the other fellow has been gone for years. I doubt I could today just stand up and write a binary search from scratch that was worth darn. Even though it is not that tough of a problem. Programming in my opinion is a reading comprehension skill, solving cute little technical problems won't build large scale maintainable solutions. Even though they are fun to throw around at interviews they don't prove much. :)