I've moved to doing something extremely simple: just give me pseudo-code for indexOf given a string and a character. If you can't write the 4-5 liner for linearly searching a string for a character, then there's not much point in moving further. It is shocking how many people get tripped up by it.
Is it a sign of insecurity that I just popped open vi to make sure I could solve this? :)
Where I work, we've been trying to fill a vacancy for a senior dev for months. Our one whiteboard question is similarly easy: find the largest integer in an array (The interviews have become easier since I was hired on). And yet... I've been watching an endless parade of people with decades of experience who apparently don't know how to write a for loop :(
