I agree that the fundamentals are important. In my opinion, half of the coding interview is having strong foundations in CS, and the other is being able to clea

I agree that the fundamentals are important. In my opinion, half of the coding interview is having strong foundations in CS, and the other is being able to clearly convey that. I'm still in university, but have managed to intern at a few a places so far and found the critical parts of each interview to be nearly identical. Microsoft and Google asked questions that boiled down to basic data structure problems, and Dropbox asked a simple backtracking problem. The problems weren't ones I had specifically prepared for, but were ones that I could break down because of my foundations in CS. The only interview I've failed was my first one. The interviewer asked me to implement a Gaussian blur on a small whiteboard; between not knowing the algorithm and not having enough room, I flopped pretty hard. There wasn't a realistic way to prepare for this question, it was just one of those things you had to know at the time.