> In my opinion a clearly superior question is "Why might you want to rebalance a binary tree?" How would you answer a prospective candidate who's convinced th

> In my opinion a clearly superior question is "Why might you want to rebalance a binary tree?" How would you answer a prospective candidate who's convinced the only reason you would ask such a question is to make them feel stupid? [After all the concrete choice of a BST to implement a collection is an "implementation detail" that most programmers probably rarely have to worry about.] Is this attitude less defensible in response to your question than the test in the original post? It seems to me that if you feel that way, it is only because you have an inside view on how your question is testing something valuable. The author(s) of the original post almost certainly feel that their test is testing something valuable too. > In fact I would rather hire people who I feel are smarter than me. Wouldn't you? within reason :P But I would certainly rather work with/hire people who will not assume everything I tell them to do is primarily/solely motivated by some narcissistic self-serving intent until I dedicate extra time to proving otherwise. I feel life is too short to deal with that.