[braythwayt]

For many engineering candidates, we ask them to design the data schema for a calendar. I’m sure my employer and the question are not a secret. We have various follow-ons, like handling the wild number of ways meetings can be periodic, exceptions, and so on.

Nobody has ever asked me how often we need to build calendaring software, because I explain right up front that while this is a “toy” question, our core product functionality schedules people, and nearly every feature from a calendar app has some analogue to things we either do, or are asked to do but haven’t prioritized yet.

I think it’s ok to ask “toy” questions, but I also think that there should be a ready answer to the question “Does this have anything at all to do with the job?”

p.s. We don’t ask a question directly about scheduling, for a simple reason: Almost everybody understands the basic idea of a calendar, so it’s a more “level playing field” for candidates to think about calendars than schedules.

[partyboat1586]

Schema is something you work with everyday so that is fair. Even if the particular schema is for a made up problem it's fairly close to reality.