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US / coding / interviews

There is a category of job candidates who can't code. I'm not talking about fancy graph traversals, hashes or recursions, but of a simple requirement: read straighforward instructions and write code that works. How do you test for that? Synthetic problems are often either too convoluted, or too trivial, or rely on some assumption that is never universal: knowing a particular language or software packet or an algorithm, which a given person could have just overlooked in their past, yet the fact of having overlooked that doesn't disqualify them from anything.
Just came up with a fitting interview question for such a case:

Give them the f1040 booklet + an hour or two of time and ask to write a script (they can even chose the language) that would do last year's tax return for a reasonably simple set of cases (say, only basic schedules, no itemized deduction, no crazy depentands... at most a family with small kids)
Grade by feeding the returns of some of current junior programmers (having them slap together a script like that before)
If the bottom line of the produced code matches what the junior got, hire the candidate.
If the resulting tax is higher than the junior's results, don't hire
If the candidate's results are lower than the junior's and the code appears to be correct, fire the junior, hire the candidate...
... at least the junior will save on the last year's taxes

Можна не дякувати.