It's much more important to get a smart and adaptable programmer than one who memorized his compsci textbooks. Yes, an understanding of data structures and algo

It's much more important to get a smart and adaptable programmer than one who memorized his compsci textbooks. Yes, an understanding of data structures and algorithms can be helpful, but unless messing around in that space is really going to comprise a large percentage of on-the-job duties (and as the grandparent indicated, it's not for 99% of us who can just use the canned implementations from the stdlib), it's stupid to make it a large percentage of success in the interview process. I'm glad to hear that Amazon kept the textbook-style questions light -- it's not what you usually hear about happening in interviews with big tech companies.