My worst ever interview was for a mid-college internship. The task was a string-matching question, and I was explicitly failed for not using the Rabin-Karp algo

My worst ever interview was for a mid-college internship. The task was a string-matching question, and I was explicitly failed for not using the Rabin-Karp algorithm. Mind, I had never heard of the thing, and I produced a valid answer with slower runtime, but since I didn't know it or invent a publication-worthy algorithm on the spot we were done. Most interviews are a bit better than that, but I'm always disturbed when people ask for algorithms that aren't either common sense or common knowledge. If it was worthy of publication and isn't relevant to the job, it probably shouldn't be tested on the fly. This system (and a lot of others) beat the heck out of that.