I rather like what Joel has to say here on Trivia Guy:

The second worst kind of interviewer is the Quiz Show Interviewer. This is the kind of person who thinks that smart means “knows a lot of facts.” They just ask a bunch of trivia questions about programming and give points for correct answers. Just for fun, here is the worst interview question on Earth: “What’s the difference between varchar and varchar2 in Oracle 8i?” This is a terrible question. There is no possible, imaginable correlation between people that know that particular piece of trivia and people that you want to hire. Who cares what the difference is? You can find out online in about fifteen seconds! Remember, smart does not mean “knows the answer to trivia questions.” Anyway, software teams want to hire people with aptitude, not a particular skill set. Any skill set that people can bring to the job will be technologically obsolete in a couple of years, anyway, so it’s better to hire people that are going to be able to learn any new technology rather than people who happen to know how to make JDBC talk to a MySQL database right this minute.

Consistently accurate and true pretty much across the board, in my experience, unless the nature of the hire is just uncompromisingly, unabashedly and unequivocally tactical in the purest sense possible, and in a large environment with a very granular division of labour.