&gt; If your software team works on code with lots of binary trees, interview questions about them makes a ton of sense.<p>Not really, because anyone reasonably competent could be up to speed on tree operations in an afternoon on the job. Interviewing them to see if they already know likely takes more energy than having them learn about them.<p>That holds true for lots of things. &quot;You say you haven&#x27;t used GitLab. Too bad: that&#x27;s what we use so we&#x27;ll have to hire someone else.&quot; &quot;Huh? I&#x27;m pretty sure I can figure it out in a couple of hours.&quot; &quot;Nope. We need someone ready to hit the ground running.&quot;