that they would not impress me as competent unless there was something good to be said for them.

Yeah, I am pretty likely wrong. But I don't know of any cases where I have failed yet.

Note that I do give interviewees coding questions. Admittedly carefully chosen so that you could answer them without understanding Perl specifically, but not ones that you can get by just having a few memorized acronyms. (For instance figure out what this code does, why it is slow, and how to fix it.)

Another type of question I like is "explain to me". I will take a basic concept that the person should know (eg for various languages I can ask about OO) and say, "Pretend that I know nothing about X. Explain X to me." I then proceed to interrupt their explanations with "stupid questions" (based on my honest guesses of where a novice might be derailed). It is amazing how quickly people for whom programming was always a black box where you just followed the template that worked get derailed on that one.

I may be foolable. But I don't think that liars in particular find me easy to bypass.

Cheers,
Ben