Yes, strings are hard and times/dates have a ridiculous number of edge cases, and sometimes very poor language support. This works both ways though; if the problem is easy enough (calculate average cycle time) it can give you lots of edge cases to discuss and really show how someone problem solves, which is really the point of a programming interview. If someone even mentioned non-english language support that would be enough for me, forget about implementing it.

I personally dislike giving questions with too many rabbit holes. My observation on a few questions is that it’s a 50/50 shot if the candidate who freezes on a question recognized more nuances than the candidate who didn’t which means I’m not getting any data.

Fizz buzz was a great question in that it had pretty much a Boolean success criteria.

The interviewer needs to be good/prepared to make it work.

If the interviewer only says "Write String.contains that passes these test cases" goes back to playing with their phone, several things may happen. One person will take that absolutely literally ("It's a test; better do as I'm told"), and you'll dismiss that apparent garbage or move onto the "real" assessment where they're hoping to shine.

Another will get bogged down in something the interviewer regards as a distraction, and "waste" a bunch of time on something the interviewer regards as a distraction. "He handled unicode, but not substring matching (KMP or Booyer-Moore) or vice versa." Maybe someone will goldilocks it and hit the right (not-explicitly-specified) balance of (also unspecified) features and time, but...

If you structure it as "Please, do the dumbest possible thing and we'll iterate"--and don't hold that initial pass against them--I could see it working well.

Sounds like the solution then would be to give interviewers all of the systems and support they would normally have access to on the job and see how well they adapt to a conventional task or an issue that was recently solved by someone in a similar position on your company, and have their result evaluated by someone involved with the implementation or fix.

That would tell you if their workflow would fit your company much more than knowing how to run a coding challenge would.

On the other hand, tools tend to be fast to teach and pick up relative to fundamentals. Most companies have rough around the edges tooling that a candidate either wouldn’t know about or need a couple weeks to get productive in.