You may think you're doing the candidate a favor by offering to handwave away the details, but the vaguer question might actually be worse. "Can you write a correct implementation of an AVL tree on this whiteboard, in any programming language, in the next thirty minutes" is a terrible interview question, but at least it has a factual answer. [1] "Can you riff on the subject of serializing a binary tree" is an open-ended question that will inevitably be graded on an imaginary curve. And the first rule of human psychology is: When you're asked to grade people on an imaginary curve, your intuition spits out a decision that is built on unconscious bias.[1] edit: that is to say, it has a factual answer if you ask the question and then fall totally silent. Which would be evil, of course, so in practice you and the candidate will naturally turn this question into a back-and-forth repartee, and it will reduce to the same exercise of unconscious biases as the vague question is.
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