It is also important to have candidate code samples for an interview with dissection and analysis by the candidate. This is to understand where the programmer is in their professional development, how much is copy-paste and how much is functional and design integration. All this demonstrates level of knowledge and the candidates productive approaches.

Having to teach programmers how to deal with recursion and other fundamental concepts or language specific approaches like pointer arithmetic or interpreted language nuances like lambda calculus and list comprehension should not be on the table.