I think you forget that even technical interviews are still aimed at examining soft skills. "What is the 50th letter in macbeth?" could easily be interpreted a

I think you forget that even technical interviews are still aimed at examining soft skills. "What is the 50th letter in macbeth?" could easily be interpreted as "How would you go about finding the 50th letter in macbeth?" which is plenty relevant to basic scripting. "Do I have a source I can pull macbeth from?", "How does that source work?", "Can I query it for individual characters/words/chapters/etc.?" I think a fundamental problem a lot of people in the comments section are missing is that these interviews are designed to examine the approach to solving problems, not the actual answer to the problem. Sure, if you get a question about traversing a tree, they probably just want you to repeat some basic knowledge. Maybe something that will illustrate my point: If you happened to know the 50th letter of macbeth off the top of your head, it would defeat the purpose of the question. The point is to examine your problem solving process. If you were to just answer "r", then the interview would quickly pivot to: "Ok, what is the 307th?" or "Ok, what is the 50th letter of Othello?" The point is not to answer the question, so much as to establish the person's ability to answer questions. Any answer that was a straight up answer isn't useful in any way. There are all sorts of ways your example could be expanded into a useful examination of someone's programming abilities. If prompted, the interviewer might provide: "Let's say we have an api for querying the text of a given shakespeare work" "Could we expand that to other historical plays?" "What if we wanted a service to provide an arbitrary letter from an arbitrary play?" "What if we wanted to allow the user to specify between several options for the api we might use?" "How could we handle differing responses from different apis?" "Should we be counting punctuation or whitespace?" It isn't so much that a certain subject (historical plays) might be relevant to the job requirements, it's that these questions are more about examining problem solving approaches.