@jghn There is a difference between asking also those questions to learn about candidates breadth of knowledge on one hand and making it a focus of interview on another. Former is ok, latter will select strong talkers and will have little relationship to actual ability to produce anything.
That's why I said it was nearly as important as the ability to code.
By that I meant that if interviewing a candidate you should be able to say w/ reasonable accuracy if they can a) actually write code (personally I don't usually care if it involves the tech stack I'm using) and b) have a strong breadth of knowledge on different paradigms, tools, languages, etc so that their decision making will be well informed going forward. Note that my lack of caring about tech stacks/languages/etc is because I've found people who are strong at b) are able to pick those things up rapidly, assuming that they actually can code in the general sense.
