[Pyxl101]

I wouldn't ask this question but I don't think it's irrelevant.

It shows you that the person understands concepts like recursion, is familiar with data structures like trees, and understands how to express and work with those concepts in code.

Completing this problem should take only a few minutes and tells you whether a candidate has a basic degree of competence. When someone breezes through a problem like this, you learn something. If someone struggles with it, you also learn something. You can use that knowledge to calibrate subsequent questions and find the limits of their knowledge.

I would be skeptical about the effectiveness of software engineer candidate who isn't comfortable with trees or recursion or algorithms like search. It's a weed-out question like FizzBuzz.

I wouldn't ask this question because I think there are better questions available that allows candidates to demonstrate mastery of concepts like these and also have depth so you can go into substantially more detail when the candidate performs well. (And questions that permit multiple solutions, etc.)

[scierama]

Then you want to hire people are good at interviewing; not necessarily people who are good at their job.

[maxxxxx]

I have learned programming on the job, not in school. I think I have a pretty good handle on things like recursion or traversing or implementing structures. But I don't speak the lingo so I don't know what "Implement a recursive depth first traversal of a tree" means exactly. I have been doing this for 25 years now and I don't think I have ever heard anybody formulating a problem that way.

[xfer]

What do you mean, you don't understand "lingo"? Do you not understand english? Because that's an easily understood english sentence, and you just claimed "pretty good handle on things like recursion or traversing or implementing structures".

What's the difficulty with questions like that? But honestly you are lucky if you get asked these questions. Usually it is more about some absurd dynamic programming questions.

[joedo3]

I suppose the debate is really between those who want to know and those who don't want to or feel that they don't need to.