Excessively complex DSA questions are not very useful for me as an interviewer. I prefer to offer a fairly simple test problem that has room for elaboration.

Excessively complex DSA questions are not very useful for me as an interviewer. I prefer to offer a fairly simple test problem that has room for elaboration. For example, when evaluating SQL skills, looking how the candidate would model mapping between companies and stock ticker symbols is instructive. You can start with a simple flat table, extend to one to many relationships, discuss when normalization and denormalization make sense. You can keep elaborating this, too--add in multiple exchanges to get many to many, and so forth. This lets you see how the candidate evolves a design in the face of changing requirements, which is critical. These kinds of questions are great for leveling an applicant. How a junior dev answers these questions will be very different from what a senior dev has to say.