To me, this question (conform to List<T>) only makes sense as in interview question if some hand waving is allowed. My instinct is that the question is intende

To me, this question (conform to List<T>) only makes sense as in interview question if some hand waving is allowed. My instinct is that the question is intended to accomplish two things. First, they want make sure whoever is taking the test has to implement a linked list that works more generically for whatever object is stored, rather than just for ints, strings, and so forth - so they're going to want to see object comparison. Also, they want to see if the candidate is aware of how to implement an interface. So implementing a few key methods would be a good demonstration of skills. That said, my instincts have certainly failed me in the past. I figured that a big of hand waving and an explanation of the data structures to solve a problem, along with some code, would be good enough for technical interview, and I have been rejected - companies can't give too much info because of possible lawsuits and so forth, but I have been told that I didn't make enough coding progress on the technical interviews. So eh, maybe they really did expect this, I couldn't say. On another point - I'm not really outraged by much, in terms of hiring policies. I mean, it's bad to waste people's time, but in general, I'm OK with companies having high standards and tolerating a very high false negative rate, if that's their choice. What I can't stand is the constant complaining about how hard it is to hire from companies that do this.