[vasu_man]

"Every step, conversation and question must be pertinent to the day-to-day of the role"

While I agree with the author's 'golden rule', I believe the complex data structure questions are just a way to filter interviewing candidates in a highly competitive job market. It's akin to the highly competitive Indian Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) where hundreds of thousands of students solve complex problems in Math, Physics, and Chemistry to get into premiere institutions with few thousand seats, most of whom do not pursue a career in sciences.

[ozim]

I think that biggest issue for me is when some small startup acts like "premier institution". If you need to sling out cookie cutter code to deliver stuff to your customers don't pretend you are going to change the world.

I just rejected one company because they had 4 pages of NDA and were small company.