Jesus, this is like listening to the mass voice of insecure self righteousness. Unfortunately this is all too typical in the IT community. If egg heads could step back and look at business problems you would realize that being a good programmer is adaptability, business acumen and unless you are working for the Google's of the world the ability to sling some code to automate an otherwise expensive process. I would focus your interview questions to somethign relevant not just a nice recursion problem to partake in a proverbial "cock comparing contest".