[rohansingh]

Thanks :-) That is a go-to interview question for us and we actually all do it slightly differently and take it in different directions depending on your expertise or specialization.

It is really closely aligned to what our core service is (distributing and streaming files) and is a great chance to talk with the interviewee and figure out where their strengths are.

Totally encourage other people to interview this way. It's what I've done at the past few companies I've been at and really worked excellently — just think of a problem you're working or have worked on, and distill it into an interview problem.

[staunch]

I also like this style, but you have to be very mindful of the fact that you've been thinking about the problem 1000x more than the candidate. The Curse of Knowledge[1] haunts the interview process. I haven't tried it much, but maybe it would be better to always use a fresh problem in each interview that not even you had seen. Maybe selected from StackOverflow.

1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge