I haven't received a formal education in CS, and I know about CAP and what it means.
Reading the Aphyr "Jepsen" series is what helped me learn it... when I was still in high school. And this was necessary because I was curious about which database I needed to use for a particular side project I was writing.
It's totally possible to just Google "bubble sort complexity" or "CAP" and learn about it.
Yes, you can today easily find quite a lot of information and learn about it, but this was not the situation the original poster lamented about.
The claim was that when faced with such question, one can just google it and read the answer. Problem solved. Because these are just some random facts like who is the president of France.
My point was that in my opinion these questions actually probe the general understanding about the CS field.
You act as though CS knowledge is some high priesthood of supreme mathematical reasoning insulated from the internet.
As a matter of practical use, most of the time details about algorithms and data structures, from implementation through complexity analysis, can easily be regarded as "mere facts." Those times when this doesn't apply are times when somebody applying formal academic level CS is surely required, but these are far less frequent than most programming tasks require--even at Google.
No, this was not my intention. Sure people do not know all the facts and all the implementation details and corner cases of some specific algorithm, but I would expect them to have some basic knowledge.
This is like knowing that lookup complexity of the hash table is usually O(1) (but could become O(n)) and one should use it instead of list when frequent lookups are necessary.
I am not an interviewer, but I think that the questions listed were actually quite good pruning questions and if you do not know them, well, there are the search engines and you can look them up for the next time instead of starting lamenting about the unfairness and showing the ignorance that is in in this case in my opinion demonstrating the serious negligence.
if someone is unaware of CAP, they're unlikely to have been working in an environment where it was relevant. if this same person starts working in an environment where it's relevant, i'd wager that it will be hard to remain unaware.
I have a CS degree. I learned about the CAP theorem, and I work with the nature of it daily. But my mind have ventured beyond the CAP theorem, it's implications are now mere facts of distributed systems, and the name "CAP theorem" had simply sliped out of my mind. If you want to quiz knowledge, rather than google-fu and name dropping, ask if you can make a distributed system with consistency and availability.
Instead of asking about Bubble sort, ask what is generally the complexity of a naive sorting algorithm and how good it can get for a general case.
I have investigated immutable hash tables but I do not know much about concurrent hash tables. This is my blind spot, so I do not know what the relevant question about the Hopscotch hashing would be.
Instead of asking what is CAP theorem, ask if you can make a distributed system with consistency and availability at the same time.
I think that this was the intention behind these questions after all and is the reason why I am trying to argue in support of them.
There's a middleground between those extremes. There's lots of knowledge that isn't relevant most of the time, but when it is relevant its worth its weight in gold. (And often these things aren't so obvious that people will google search them.)
When I'm trying to evaluate a candidate, I want people who proactively search out knowledge in that middle zone. People who understand complexity theory, and CPU caching behaviour, and the C10k/C10M problem just because they know they might need it some day. Because they want to work on problems where this stuff is relevant.
This sort of knowledge is the difference between hearing "our website is slow - I think its the database?" and "our website is slow - I took a look and our database server has run out of open file handles. But I'm still confused - that shouldn't explain the latency we're seeing."
The CAP theorem is a great example of this sort of middleground might-be-useful knowledge. Understanding how your database will behave in the face of network partitions is exactly the sort of thing that separates good engineers from great ones.