The basic question is whether it is a good idea to ask questions which humiliate a sizeable portion of interviewee simply because this maximizes your personal utility?
I don't even know for certain if such an approach does maximize your time versus finding-good-programmers ratio but let's assume it does.
The thing is you are willing to maximize this ratio by doing things that treat some portion people who have ability as if they don't (even it's also treating people without ability fairly)?
I'd claim that doing that sets you for up an adversarial relationship with everyone in the workplace - the people hire you can feel they're under-the-gun. I strongly suspect that the "almost no one can code" crowd are the people who live in these adversarial environments, which produce bad code through all the emotional and organizational games this implies.
I don't even know for certain if such an approach does maximize your time versus finding-good-programmers ratio but let's assume it does.
The thing is you are willing to maximize this ratio by doing things that treat some portion people who have ability as if they don't (even it's also treating people without ability fairly)?
I'd claim that doing that sets you for up an adversarial relationship with everyone in the workplace - the people hire you can feel they're under-the-gun. I strongly suspect that the "almost no one can code" crowd are the people who live in these adversarial environments, which produce bad code through all the emotional and organizational games this implies.