The only reasonable, real-world solution to the linked list question is "How many bids do you need for me to collect for licensing the third-party code library? Three? It's usually at least three. I'll look at Infragistics, JetBrains, and anything I can find that's open source, and get back to you by COB. Are there any specific features that the linked list has to have? Any deal breakers? Do we need official support, or is community forum support enough?"
You ask me to do a linked list--in 2017--and I'll have to start determining whether that smell is "Not Invented Here" or "Cargo Cult". How many languages don't have such lists as part of their standard libraries now (or at least part of a common libre-license or gratis-license library)?
But no... I'll just continue to answer the question as though my CS prof is grading me on it, and just convert my concerns into salary expectations for the negotiations phase. Any company that asks such questions is obviously bad at gauging real technical skill, therefore I should ask for way more money than I think I am worth, and invest all of my limited acting skill into believing that number. They are relying on me to tell them how good I am, so I will game the system, cram for their stupid questions, and tell them I am the absolute best.
Then I can spend all my working hours copy-pasting the answers to already-solved problems from the Internet.
The real genius developers are spending their free time helping lesser developers on Stack Exchange/Overflow for free, because the companies that hired them have no idea how to make use of that level of expertise, and that's the only way they ever get to encounter any fun or interesting problems to solve.
I guess I'll amend my previous statement. I need to discern between "Not Invented Here", "Cargo Cult", and "Power-Abusing Management". You won't be able to tell by asking me. I know linked lists forward and backward--though the backward part really only concerns doubly-linked lists. I won't stop judging you for asking the question, but I will answer it. It will then provoke automatic follow-up questions about how much you rely on first-party and third-party code libraries, and about which kinds of open source licenses your company finds acceptable for use with their products.
Interviewing is a two-way street. If you ask questions more relevant to academics than real-world employment, I will try to figure out whether the pay your company offers is worth dealing with the apparent dysfunction in it. I can deal with almost anything if you pay me enough.
Your presumption is that the ability to answer linked list questions in an interview gracefully is positively correlated with future job performance.
The burden of proof is on the person making the assertion. The only way I can see evidence for it is if people ask those questions in the interview and make note of the response, but do not use it for the hiring decision. Then, in the future, after the worth of the employee is measurable, correlate it with the answers to the experimental questions.
As far as I am aware, no company asks experimental interview questions that do not impact the hiring decision, in large numbers and for years at a time, just to gauge the merit of those questions before adopting them into the interview process. It is far more common for someone to decide on a theoretical basis that a question has real discriminating power without any real evidence, or to stop asking a particular type of question and then maybe compare employee populations a few years later.
You ask me to do a linked list--in 2017--and I'll have to start determining whether that smell is "Not Invented Here" or "Cargo Cult". How many languages don't have such lists as part of their standard libraries now (or at least part of a common libre-license or gratis-license library)?
But no... I'll just continue to answer the question as though my CS prof is grading me on it, and just convert my concerns into salary expectations for the negotiations phase. Any company that asks such questions is obviously bad at gauging real technical skill, therefore I should ask for way more money than I think I am worth, and invest all of my limited acting skill into believing that number. They are relying on me to tell them how good I am, so I will game the system, cram for their stupid questions, and tell them I am the absolute best.
Then I can spend all my working hours copy-pasting the answers to already-solved problems from the Internet.
The real genius developers are spending their free time helping lesser developers on Stack Exchange/Overflow for free, because the companies that hired them have no idea how to make use of that level of expertise, and that's the only way they ever get to encounter any fun or interesting problems to solve.