I benefit from my degrees but I would find it annoying if I would get asked questions like that. I design (among other things) crypto algorithms for banking purposes and implement them in a plethora of languages including ARM asm. But balancing a tree? I did that in an exam on paper 22 years or something ago. I would be able to do it given enough time but I probably would just walk out. 20 odd years ago when I was a cocky and already quite experienced coder, I would have done it easily but, although already having done many real life projects, I was a crap coder. And, due to the strangeness of the market and the scarcity back then, my current freelance salary in Europe, is not too different from what it was then. My feeling is still that those questions are pointless unless you want people straight out of uni. And then they already did their exams with those questions, so again pretty pointless...