"I really dislike the idea of "cramming" for interviews. If a person hasn't been developing problem solving and coding skills throughout their career, then it's hardly something they can read up on and develop in a week before an interview."
You're misunderstanding the issue here. For the type of things that matter in 95% of actual software, it's true that you can't learn all that in a week before an interview. However, those things are somewhat difficult to get across in a 60 minute interview, and good interviewers who can do that are rare. So they resort to algorithm questions because they don't require much skill to know. Which sucks but the interviewee can easily account for it by (re)learning that same stuff with a week of preparation, maybe a little more if they've got no experience in algorithms.
You're misunderstanding the issue here. For the type of things that matter in 95% of actual software, it's true that you can't learn all that in a week before an interview. However, those things are somewhat difficult to get across in a 60 minute interview, and good interviewers who can do that are rare. So they resort to algorithm questions because they don't require much skill to know. Which sucks but the interviewee can easily account for it by (re)learning that same stuff with a week of preparation, maybe a little more if they've got no experience in algorithms.