If you were tasked with hiring some new programmers for your business, and had the choice to only pick from one of the approaches listed below, what approach would you take and why?
Approach 1: Asking several question about the syntax of a particular language that can be looked up in a book. You know, questions like what is the difference between ref and out or what is the difference between session state and view state.
or
Approach 2: Present several real world programming problems and ask the applicant to write some pseudo code right there on the spot. Stuff like, show me how to implement the state pattern for a particular scenario or Implement a strategy pattern with a factory to solve a particular problem.