We have a medium-difficulty coding question which can translate into any language. It's pretty open-ended, in that there are a few different ways to tackle the problem. It's not algorithmic, but it definitely forces the candidate to flex their coding and problem solving skills. From watching how the candidate proceeds, I get a very good idea of their skill level and how they react when they hit a roadblock: are they able to debug? Do they get overly frustrated?

From this relatively simple question, I get a lot of insight into the candidate's skill level, i.e. how well do they write code? and it has nothing to do with algorithms.