This guy is taking a lot of heat for bad interviewing technique, and this may or may not be the case - but it's hard to say, given that we don't know what kind

This guy is taking a lot of heat for bad interviewing technique, and this may or may not be the case - but it's hard to say, given that we don't know what kind of a position he's interviewing for. Given the job requirements of the position, this may be a perfectly reasonable question - i.e. if the job requires someone to build and maintain large custom data stores, it's pretty acceptable practice to ask questions that reveal how much they know about large custom data stores. Personally I wouldn't be over the moon crazy about this question, but it's still a hell of a lot better than being peppered with random "what is X?" type questions that test nothing about your ability as a developer, and only what you currently directly know. That is to say, those questions where you end up looking like an idiot if you didn't happen to read the same man pages as the interviewer. In the types of questions this guy is asking, you have to basically guess what they're looking for - so it can end up being a bit of a mind reading exercise, which is why I wouldn't be terribly crazy about it - but it's still by far the lesser of several evils, simply because it's a direct demonstration of how a developer thinks about development, instead of how much rote minutae they've mastered or whether they can find a way to stick eight kittens into six holes without any broken legs of flying fur, etc....