The sad reality is that technical interviews in the majority of cases do not represent the day-to-day aspects of the job you're interviewing for. The heavy emph

The sad reality is that technical interviews in the majority of cases do not represent the day-to-day aspects of the job you're interviewing for. The heavy emphasis on algo questions were popularized by Google as a way to filter through a huge pipeline of candidates. Guess what - 99+% of companies do not have a similar pipeline, yet blindly follow the Google format. Before that, tech companies followed Microsoft's lead with their puzzle questions. In the ideal world, your hard-earned knowledge and experience should prepare you for the challenges in the role you're applying for, but sadly most interviews test for some kind of coding ninjas that spend their days writing optimized merge sort implementations before lunch and building high-performing distributed caches in the afternoon, all day every day. Mind you, none of those problems are particularly difficult, just let's not kid ourselves that they represent the kind of daily challenges you're going to face even at places like Google or Facebook (and especially not under the same constraints as the interviews). The fact that Cracking The Coding Interview is considered a must-read before interviewing is a bright indicator of how bad things have gotten.