I did. He root-causes it to Joel Spolsky's interview style which the author claims was heavily influenced by what was useful to know at Microsoft during his tenure.
My response is to highlight why it's still relevant to ask them today.
My response is to highlight why it's still relevant to ask them today.
To be clear I'm not trying to suggest you think a candidate couldn't do that, I'm just surprised that this apparently didn't occur to Spolsky
I don't see anything in this about diagramming. In fact, from an earlier comment in that article this would be an "easy" or "medium" problem, and how quickly someone can solve these is something he considers. Does it take you 20 minutes to reverse a linked list, even with his Google-search like hints, or does it take you < 5 minutes because it comes to you quickly and any delay is talking or trying to keep a consistent pseudo code format on the white board?