OP, it sounds like you work by looking up and remember solutions, and assume everyone does the same. You're saying the questions are BS because you haven't seen

OP, it sounds like you work by looking up and remember solutions, and assume everyone does the same. You're saying the questions are BS because you haven't seen the solution in a long time (or ever): > it has been a long time > I vaguely remember > this would have been a trivial problem to solve from memory, but that’s besides the point > Do I remember how to implement those algorithms? No > I am not a recent college graduate anymore who has breadth-first search memorized > I haven’t implemented BFS in years, there is no way I can come up with a solution right here and now > If, and when [...] I will go look it up I normally wouldn't point it out since it sounds really condescending, but after https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 I don't know what to assume anymore: They don't want you to remember or memorize solutions, they want you to be able to implement it given just an informally explained approach (which you may also be responsible for coming up with). Converting ideas into code without having seen the code before is a realistic, desirable and not at all uncommon skill. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a candidate to be able to write code given the description "These objects have a value and links to similar objects. We want to find a certain value by first looking at all our nearest neighbors, then at their nearest neighbors, then at theirs, and so forth.", even if they had never heard of graph theory or BFS, or seen code for it before.