I cannot imagine ever hiring for a programmer position without having the candidate white board one or more programming problems.
I say this, because I've been the "technical interview" for people being hired in as programmers who really were not at all qualified. The resume looked great, they absolutely nailed the "let's talk about process, and how we work together" process interviews, as well as the "let's talk about programming without actually doing any" interviews. And then I asked them to whiteboard, and they absolutely cratered.
One of the questions I used to use when looking at candidates who listed on their resume a proficiency with C/C++ was a simple opener.
Please implement this function:
/* Implement a simplified version of integer to ascii, supporting only base 10, and assuming a 32 bit value on a 2s-Complement architecture */
char * itoa(Int32 value)
{
}
This is not a hard question per se (as with most of my interview questions, I stole it from questions I was asked in an interview). There are a couple of ways to approach it, and while there is a corner case, I don't hold missing it against the candidate. Getting it on the other hand is a bonus. Mostly, I want to see you approach the problem.
And yet, one candidate confidently wrote this:
char *itoa(Int32 value)
{
return (char *) value;
}
Not only did he confidently write it, it took a fair bit to convince him he was wrong. Even with a lot of prompting, what was supposed to be the first 15 minutes of the interview took the whole hour, and he never did get the problem solved.
And that is why I'll always want anyone being hired for a development role to actually write code as part of the interview. Because I've *seen* people with the right resume say all the right things, and flunk the ability to actually write anything. I no longer assume "basic coding competence".
[As a side note, having been on both sides of whiteboarding questions, it is *always* easier to spot the bug while you are sitting there watching them write. That's why the interviewer always seems to have a laser focus on the bug when you haven't seen it. As a candidate, as soon as you finish writing it down (and you should talk about what you are doing and why as you go), say something to the effect of "Now to step through this and look for bugs", and out loud start debugging what you wrote with example cases.]