[watwut]

I would kind of expect that if you can design a highly available, fault tolerant, redundant system then you would figure it out. I can see how you could find the question easy and not allowing you to show what you can do. But that is opposite situation. A lot also depends on the position. If the position is not leadership position and does not require specialized knowledge you have, I don't think the company does wrong by not asking about it. Then those easier questions have place. I assume that overpriced "digital transformation consultant", "implementation consultant", or "solutions architect" does not write code or only little of it. As such, code focused interview makes no sense. It is however different for position that writes code a lot.

I don't get insulted over basic questions. Mostly because I worked in a company that did not asked programming questions. As a result had to work with few people who could talk design and maintainability such, looked like great socially and turned out they could not write the code except in simplest situations. It was not good and harm was long term, Largely because of resentments etc that build up in team who had to do someones work while that person was treated as superstar. Such person needs strategy to mask inability and those are all toxic - masking own inability by blaming others etc.

What are alternatives out there? Take home assignment, fizzbuzz, simple algorithm, trivia questions, requiring you to already know exact technology they use. Someone complains about every one of these. There is no hiring process that make everyone happy and fit everyone, but imo, as long as company does not go to some crazy extreme somewhere it should be fine. If candidate have to balance red-black trees then it is very clearly too much, figuring whether string is palindrom is not too much.

There is also something good to be said about repetitive hiring process where company can compare how people did on interview and then how they did in real life. As such, it will contain some generic or easy questions.

[scarface74]

If you are getting paid to solve business problems, then why not have them solve simple version of business problems?

My interviewing process for developers is giving them a skeleton of a class with corresponding unit tests that they have to make pass.

Then they get another set of unit tests that they have to make pass without breaking the first set.

The code models a simplified version of real world types of problems we had.

[watwut]

That sounds good, really. It is better then asking about breadth/depth first search. Added bonus is that potential employee gets some idea about what he will do daily too before making decision.

Another way to screw hiring is to select for algorithms loving geek who seeks algorithmic challenge and can recite obscure edge cases - and then put him on position where he has to solve normal business problems or maintain unit tests because that is what job is. And then wonder why genius is demotivated and does not seem to produce.

But, I still don't think either of these search questions is outrageous or a deal breaking question. It is within acceptable questions range - partly because it is so common that I would expect a person to quick google it if they heard it twice already and did not figured it out in stress of interview.