Just look at how varied and complicated some of the explanations are for this out there. Some take mathematical approaches, others (me) try to boil it down to a few intuitive sentences... I can see it giving some insight into a candidate.
And if you already know the best practice, like I said, it's not just about whether you know the answer -- it's how simply you can explain it to a teammate and the theory behind why it works. That's also a useful skill to interview for, especially for more experienced candidates.
Not saying it’s a good interview question, just that most good programmers shoukd be able to come up with some form of answer if they understand linked lists.
like many ridiculously looking interview questions, they are actually a filter. For this particular types of questions young people tend to quickly solve them. In 1987, in 9th grade, during one of the first computer classes, never before seeing or touching programming (previous years of school in a small town in USSR), I myself came up with Dijkstra algorithm in less than 10 minutes when we were assigned task of finding shortest path. I remember the teacher looking impressed :) These days i treat it more like a signal - if people asks such puzzles a lot then they either intentionally filtering or even don't understand that and seriously think it is important CS(cience).
The point is that that's an absurd thing to assume. It would almost never come up organically (and has only really come up in the context of awful interview question blogs). It's not a taught/talked about algorithm.
Rote memorization is also a poor metric for job performance.
Excuse me if I don't recall a complete year of Algorithms and Data Structures lectures and evaluation projects done about 25 years ago.