I'm all for hiring people who can figure things out and know how to figure things out. I'm not blind to the fact people will google and copy-paste-modify stackoverflow example code and don't have strong issue against hiring someone who would work that way.

So my simple whiteboard interview question started as "Print the numbers from 1 to 10" but then I had a few candidates that would just write the numbers out on the board.

Since it happened more than once I figured it was a me problem so I became more specific with "Write code to print the numbers from 1 to 10". But then one one candidate would out dumb me and write 10 lines of print statements.

So I thought it would be clever to force a loop of with a really large number: "Write code to print the numbers from 1 to 1 million." but I had one candidate who started to write out a bunch print statements and I had to stop him.

The latest iteration is "Using a for loop to print the numbers from 1 to 1 million putting one number per line." I usually get blank stares. It's either they think it's some sort of trick question or they don't know how to do it. One time I saw an implementation using an if statement to skip 0 and an extra print for the last 1000000.

The solution to that was to tell HR to let me phone interview them for 10 minutes before brining them onsite.