That’s a terrible way to interview. Interviews are high stress, time constrained settings where you’re talking to people you don’t know. If you want thoughtful answers, you need to be precise in what you’re asking. You can’t be like “tell me about yourself” and then complain I didn’t get from the candidate whether steak is their favorite food.
I don't think that it is a terrible way to interview to all, for a senior position.
A generic question like "how do you organise data in this situation" is open-ended enough that it merits followups that the interviewee has to drive. If I was being interviewed, I'd ask "what are the operations you want on the data (random lookup vs scan, append, lifo access etc), what performance guarantees you want on those operations, what persistence and distributed fault-tolerance guarantees if any, etc.
It is no different from having to be in front of a client and teasing out what the client really wants. The interviewee has to guide the questions and answer them in a satisfactory way. Reminds of Prof. Manuel Blum (then at Berkeley), whose class project would be "think of a problem and solve it, and you'll be graded on both the quality of the problem and the solution".
I am not disagreeing with what the question is supposed to do and how candidates are supposed to answer.
The problem lies in the fact that it creates too much ambiguity in terms of how the candidate is evaluated. Some interviewers may give you credit for your approach, but like the parent, more often than not, you’re evaluated on getting to a specific question or direction, in a specific amount of time. And that just creates a bias towards you hiring people who have a chain of thought exactly like you, which may tbh be not correct chain of thought at all.
