[tobyjsullivan]

I've given enough interviews to know it's all relative.

To cherry pick one example: "What color has the middle wire feeding into the distributer cap?" implies interviewers ask ridiculously specific questions that you could "look up if and when you needed to know."

The problem is for some applicants that question could be "how would you implement Google's PageRank" and for other applicants it can be something as simple as "what's the difference between an interface and an abstract class." Think what you want but if you don't think you need to be able to answer the latter, it's probably not going to work out between us.

To be honest, of the few interviews where I've been the applicant, the questions have always been fair and I've never been treated with the level of disrespect that was demonstrated in this scenario. That said, I'm completely willing to believe I've just been lucky so far.

[bicknergseng]

The problem I perceive is that that question gets asked to people who will never need to know it. I too often see people interviewing for front end web or javascript positions asked questions about binary search trees or something that totally doesn't relate to front end development, instead of asking about closures or what they think about coffeescript. Honestly, I think at this point if you're asking about various search algorithm big o timings to find out if a programmer can build an iOS app or do Rails dev, you're doing it wrong.