As the interviewer, the question I'm trying to answer is "Can you fulfill a role we need fulfilled?" There's no direct way to determine the answer to that. However, a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for a broad range of development positions is "Can you write code in any language to sort/reverse/find elements within an array".

The details will vary by interviewer and by role, but the basic idea is the same: if you are incapable of doing this, nothing you say in other interview portions will fool me into thinking we can hire you.

See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...