I'm not sure how asking someone who's going to be working in computer programming something about computer science is equal to asking someone who's going to be working in computer programming something about medicine. Those two things aren't equivalent. Could you perhaps clarify?
Engineering is the use of knowledge/science to solve problems, right? So why is asking someone to use knowledge to solve a problem not applicable to the hiring process?
To be clear, this isn't the same question as "why are manhole covers round", or "how would you move a mountain".
The act of creating a, say a self balancing binary search tree, is something you should know about. If you ever have to implement it, you go look it up. Engineers are exactly the same - you would rather have one that know where to look up all the stuff, or search for information, than one that can regurgitate the entirety of his education theory.
Engineering is the use of knowledge/science to solve problems, right? So why is asking someone to use knowledge to solve a problem not applicable to the hiring process?
To be clear, this isn't the same question as "why are manhole covers round", or "how would you move a mountain".