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Yes, variations of inorder successor problems are commonly asked in technical interviews, including FAANG companies. Interviewers use them to test understanding of BST properties, tree traversal concepts, and pointer manipulation.
The optimal approach uses BST properties and the parent pointer. If the node has a right child, the successor is the leftmost node of that subtree; otherwise, move up through parent links until the node becomes a left child of its parent.
A Binary Search Tree with parent pointers is the key structure in this problem. The parent reference allows upward traversal, making it possible to find the inorder successor without performing a full tree traversal.
The time complexity is O(h), where h is the height of the tree. In the worst case, you may need to traverse from the node up to the root or down the height of the right subtree.