One person may think a "programmer" should know how to design/implement algorithms, while another would say algorithms are a library implementation issue.
The problem is many of us fill both definitions. One minute I could be creating a complex algorithm, the next I could copy/pasting a shell script from stack overflow and neither is necessarily a superset of the other, so which category would I put myself in?
I think coding interviews are fine as long as they aren't insane like what you see a lot these days. We just need a good metric on how to know if the person I'm interviewing can solve general problems, my problems, and has the appetite to grow more.
That's really hard.