On: 99 Out Of 100 Programmers Can’t Program – I Call BS

I've definitely come across candidates that simply couldn't code well. They couldn't handle basic things, and they didn't have a strong grasp of the fundamentals of their preferred languages.

Then again, I've been in interviews that were so brutally hard I stormed off rather than keep dealing with the issue. No exaggeration: I've been plopped down at an unfamiliar machine with only 1 putty window to a unix box (that didn't have emacs!) and told to write an ls clone in 30 minutes, without being allowed to open a web browser (and that was only one of three tasks to do in 1.5 hours)

But I also can't help but wonder if the author is in his own self-selected world. Now that I'm in startup-land, I see fewer incompetent people. Even being in Silicon Valley strongly ups your odds of meeting people who are competent. When I was interviewing outside of the Valley, things sometimes were confusingly bad.

I tend to think that if you're going to insist that someone write code without access to documentation and in an unfamiliar environment then you shouldn't ask for anything more than pseudocode. Otherwise you're just testing whether or not someone has memorized the standard library of whatever language you want.

You can argue that someone who has memorized the [Foo] standard library might be better at some things than someone who hasn't, of course. But I think that what you're testing for is at best tangental to the ability to design/write good code.