It is just an attempt to shortly evaluate the experience listed on paper. Thinking is only one aspect of programming. Are open form questions for which the can

It is just an attempt to shortly evaluate the experience listed on paper. Thinking is only one aspect of programming. Are open form questions for which the candidate can give an honest answer or that start a discussion better, or do you find them similar to a simple coding problem? What if during discussion I probe for more details about one particular thing? Just to be clear, I agree that coding questions can be ridiculous. These do appear in some interviews. Questions related to quicksort, radix sort, counting sort, heaps, Dijkstra, 0-1 bfs, dfs, iterative deepening, prime testing or integer factoring, or convoluted problems of counting the many ways of tiling a n x m grid with 2x1 and 1x1 tiles, can all be found in the wild. My buses problem is completely different and simpler.