The sad reality of programming interviews is that it's absolutely necessary to ask several near-trivial questions in order to flush out the candidates with awesome resumes and impressive degrees who simply have no idea how to analyze a simple problem and solve it using a computer.
Lately, I've been asking "given the starting and ending times of two calendar appointments, determine whether or not they conflict." No loops, no fancy algorithms, no tricks... and asking it has not been a waste of time. I get people writing doubly-nested loops over all of the seconds in the two intervals, comparing for equality; I get multi-line predicates full of redundancy that still yield false positives and negatives; it's depressing as hell.
Lately, I've been asking "given the starting and ending times of two calendar appointments, determine whether or not they conflict." No loops, no fancy algorithms, no tricks... and asking it has not been a waste of time. I get people writing doubly-nested loops over all of the seconds in the two intervals, comparing for equality; I get multi-line predicates full of redundancy that still yield false positives and negatives; it's depressing as hell.