Indeed... the whole "trick question" school of interviewing is basically an admission that this industry has absolutely no idea how to reliably rate job candida

Indeed... the whole "trick question" school of interviewing is basically an admission that this industry has absolutely no idea how to reliably rate job candidates (I'm not claiming that I have a magic solution myself, note...). Doctors don't, in general, get asked trick/gotcha questions when they apply for jobs. Neither do lawyers. Neither do other kinds of engineers. Neither do musicians, for that matter. From long-ago undergrad I remember that there is a data structure called a "red-black tree". Now, I've never had that as an interview question, but I could easily imagine it being one. Would I be able to answer a cold question on red-black trees? Nope. As I said, that was a long time ago, and I've never had to use one to the best of my knowledge. Would that be a good reason to filter me out? Nope. If I needed to use a red-black tree (or, in general, had a problem where some unusual type of tree might be in order), I'd pull my copies of Knuth, CLR* and Sedgewick off the shelf, look at strengths and weaknesses of the different types of tree, and make a decision. * mine is old enough that it's just CLR, not CLRS :-)