I'm not sure where this perception comes from -- my guess is it's a mix of cognitive dissonance and overgeneralizing from bad experiences. The majority of inte

I'm not sure where this perception comes from -- my guess is it's a mix of cognitive dissonance and overgeneralizing from bad experiences. The majority of interview questions I've encountered (at Google and elsewhere) are of the form: here's a data structure or API, can you use it to solve some problem? Nobody's ever asked me to prove A* from scratch. Even in cases where the question does revolve around a specific algorithm or CS concept they've always taken the time to explain it. I used to ask a question based around LZ77 encoding and I always went over the algorithm whether or not the candidate was familiar with it.