I have to agree with you there. It's not nice to have to ask such questions, it feels like the equivalent of just hammering the candidate with questions about t

I have to agree with you there. It's not nice to have to ask such questions, it feels like the equivalent of just hammering the candidate with questions about the time complexity of a bunch of random algorithms. Coding or maths interview questions are quite nice because they can be treated as puzzles that the candidate can tackle in different ways, and the interviewer can guide them without giving too much away if they get too lost. DS questions on the other hand come in two flavors: pop quiz type of questions like the ones in this post, or the "pretend you have data, how would you write a recommendation system" ones, which also suck. I try to mitigate this by inserting questions when the candidate is talking about previous projects, so I can gauge if they have a deep enough understanding the stuff that they've used in the past, and also to give more context for the questions.