The interview processes at a lot of those big companies favor fresh university graduates - Other than that, they are completely random. I bet that if they force

The interview processes at a lot of those big companies favor fresh university graduates - Other than that, they are completely random. I bet that if they forced existing employees to take a slightly different variation of the test again, most of them would fail - Someone could be an expert with graph algorithms, but if a question popped up about decision trees and minimax adversarial search, would that graph expert still be able to solve the problem in time? My personal experience with the interview process at a couple of these companies is that even if you CAN solve the problems, you will usually run out of time - Unless you practised that specific problem recently. Also, they tend to favor engineers who can come up with solutions quickly as opposed to engineers who can come up with optimal solutions. They could look at stuff like open source projects you created/worked on, past successful companies you've worked at, etc... But no, they don't care about that; instead they prefer to have this random selection process which favors experts in specific algorithms or thinking styles which often have nothing to do with the company's core business.