I use a simple coding challenge as a weeder question. It requires basic use of recursion (without explicitly saying so) -- no math, no big-O, no gotchas, just writing a simple recursive function to process a small tree. It takes decent coders a few minutes to complete. Less-than-decent coders really struggle with it.
This is only a wheat/chaff separator, though. If possible, I like to see code from actual projects they've worked on to get a feel for the bigger picture (tip: open source your personal projects and obsess a bit over the code, so you have something to show off). Plus there's all the other non-code aspects to the interview.
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I use a simple coding challenge as a weeder question. It requires basic use of recursion (without explicitly saying so) -- no math, no big-O, no gotchas, just writing a simple recursive function to process a small tree. It takes decent coders a few minutes to complete. Less-than-decent coders really struggle with it.
This is only a wheat/chaff separator, though. If possible, I like to see code from actual projects they've worked on to get a feel for the bigger picture (tip: open source your personal projects and obsess a bit over the code, so you have something to show off). Plus there's all the other non-code aspects to the interview.