But these questions should be a signal to you as an interviewee. Unless they are extremely salient to your proposed job (e.g., you are applying for a position t

But these questions should be a signal to you as an interviewee. Unless they are extremely salient to your proposed job (e.g., you are applying for a position teaching algorithms) they're a sign the recruiting effort at this workplace is not very healthy. What that means is that talent and skill will be erratically dispersed throughout that organization. Requests for new staff will take a long time and may not fill needs, and that often times specific managers strongly influence who can get hired where for a variety of reasons. Personally, I play along with these questions but make a game of pointing out how incredibly synthetic and unrealistic the conditions people put around them are. The goal of the game is to basically force the interviewer to come out and say exactly what algorithm they want, by way of how many other aspects of real-world software and systems they want to exclude from the conversation.