An example of what the OP is probably talking about (to make a huge assumption here) is an example I've used alot on HN: > At an interview for a non-senior bac

An example of what the OP is probably talking about (to make a huge assumption here) is an example I've used alot on HN: > At an interview for a non-senior backend developer job on a CRUD app: "Traverse this binary search tree and provide the Big-O time complexity of your implementation" OTOH, I haven't done too many interviews being young myself, but If someone claimed to have SQL knowledge, and I were hiring for that role, I would simply draw out two-three tables in a dB and have them do basic-intermediate tasks such as INNER JOIN. Or add an index to a given table.