[danielvinson]

It really depends what type of candidate you are looking for and what sort of job it is. One of the often overlooked roles of a hiring manager is understanding the signals coming in from the interviewers, weighing the results properly against other information, and making sure that the interviews actually gave information which can correlate to on the job performance.

In the past when I've been the hiring manager, I've had inexperienced interviewers ask my candidates questions like this for all kinds of positions - when you look at who does well in other interviews and gets an offer (and performs well), it basically never correlated at all to performance in whiteboard-only CS-focused interviews.

In this case I was interviewing for a full-stack senior position where there would almost certainly be zero systems-level coding, so the interview should have been a throwaway at best.