I live in a bubble in San Francisco and post on HN, so when talking to people I usually assume (perhaps incorrectly), that they are all software engineers betw

I live in a bubble in San Francisco and post on HN, so when talking to people I usually assume (perhaps incorrectly), that they are all software engineers between the ages of 18-25 currently in the job market, interviewing at all the same hip 5 companies, so I apologize :P . In software engineer, when applying for jobs at tech companies, you are universally asked to program solutions to algorithms problems on a whiteboard that follow a very specific formula. If you ever interview for a software position, you will get these exact kinds of questions. Such questions are usually things like: "Given a N sorted lists of numbers, join the lists into a single sorted list efficiently" "Implement a Stack which has push, pop, and minimum operations in O(1)" "Traverse a Tree and print out each item in level by level order" ect They are all very formulaic and similar. In the last 3 years I've done about 100 algorithms interviews, and 9 out of 10 times it is a question I've been asked before. You can find other examples at Glassdoor, hacker rank, or project Euler. http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Interview-Questions-E9079.htm?filter.jobTitleFTS=software+engineer http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Interview-Question... https://projecteuler.net/ https://projecteuler.net/