I like what you are onto here. Algorithm questions get universally panned or praised quite often, but there is a good deal of nuance in fact. Some are much, much better than others. Some are pure trivia. I don't think most of us would bat an eyelash at the idea that most engineers need to know that a hash table is a O(c) look up, but it is an algorithm question that I've seen people fail. Conversely, your examples of what is a poor question are probably accurate in most domains.