> My sanity check for any question I ask is- Is the question I'm asking something that someone in the past published a paper about? If so then that's probably n

> My sanity check for any question I ask is- Is the question I'm asking something that someone in the past published a paper about? If so then that's probably not a good fit for a 45 minute whiteboarding interview. Also, is it a widely known algorithm? Because then I'm not measuring for programming ability; I'm measuring for rote memorization (there are people that will rote memorize all the sorting algos to be able to spit them out during interviews!). Asking for a simply program like wc, in my opinion, gives a much better idea if someone can code (hint: there's not a single way of writing it and to define a word). > I have a co-worker who used to ask people to past to parse and evaluate infix notation expressions in interviews That's a cool problem to use. I wouldn't expect a perfect parser or even a working one but I would be curious to see how they approach the problem and what they end up writing.