When I do interview training, I strongly discourage memoization / dynamic programming question. It's not that you have to have practiced this to do well. It's t

When I do interview training, I strongly discourage memoization / dynamic programming question. It's not that you have to have practiced this to do well. It's that you can have an okay candidate who practices it and then does well. A properly conducted technical interview will not be about having seen the algorithm before. Some companies screw it up though. But then, these same companies also screw up other parts of the interview process. I disagree that using certain languages makes a lot of problems trivial. Maybe it makes certain problem trivial, but those tend to be easier ones anyway. They're already trivial. And even if your language has a function that performs the exact thing being asked, the interviewer can easily ask you to go implement that thing. Java is fine for a whiteboard. So is python. So are most languages. No, python has not become synonymous with pseudocode. I'm not sure what you mean by that.