We used to ask people to right a function in C that converts an array of doubles from degrees to radians. It was amazing how many people had no idea and who had sailed through CV/resume screening, telephone interview, and 'technical discussion' part of the interview with ease.
I guess the candidates could 'talk the talk' when we were asking them questions on their CV, or general high-level questions on, say, threading or design patterns; but when it came to the crunch they couldn't write code.
Maybe the candidates were just good at generating CRUD applications and binding data to forms, and have rarely needed to process data. Not denigrating that aspect of software developement at all - it's just not what we need in our department.