I once learned a shocking lesson about the influence of my preconceptions when I accidentally took a developer through three rounds of interviews because he previously worked for Pivotal Labs and had a German (aka technical) accent.
It wasn't until the third interview that I asked him to write an algorithm to sort an array and when he couldn't I suggested instead writing an algorithm to see whether the array was already sorted. When he couldn't do that either he told me I was asking the wrong questions and not letting him show off the code he was good at.
To this day I have wondered and never discovered what type of code doesn't involve arrays, loops and comparisons however I do now ask candidates to write code right at the start of the interview loop. I simply never anticipated how many non-programmers would apply for programming positions.
I haven't written code to sort an array in nearly two decades of professional experience:) I've been lucky enough to work on some pretty non-trivial problems as well. If you asked me to do it, I could probably crank out some sort of bubble-sort (maybe).
It's not to say I haven't sorted arrays, I certainly have, but whatever standard library I'm using almost always does it for me... and pretty damn well at the same time.
While it is largely based on the context of the job, I'd think some demonstration of fundamentals, like sorting (even if it's just bubble sort :-)), is important. It's another way to see which mental tools the candidate can use when debugging problems and they're forced to drill down through the layers of abstraction provided.
It wasn't until the third interview that I asked him to write an algorithm to sort an array and when he couldn't I suggested instead writing an algorithm to see whether the array was already sorted. When he couldn't do that either he told me I was asking the wrong questions and not letting him show off the code he was good at.
To this day I have wondered and never discovered what type of code doesn't involve arrays, loops and comparisons however I do now ask candidates to write code right at the start of the interview loop. I simply never anticipated how many non-programmers would apply for programming positions.