...and we've come full circle. The industry demonstrably brought this upon itself by cargo-culting Google's interview process; combine an environment where peo

...and we've come full circle. The industry demonstrably brought this upon itself by cargo-culting Google's interview process; combine an environment where people are expected to know how to invert a BST for a Django or Rails job with a group of people who are naturally inclined to optimise and shortcut and this is exactly what you can expect to happen. From a personal perspective, if I were to decide to switch jobs, I'd break out Cracking the Coding Interview rather than reading papers detailing how best to implement a Splay Tree because it's simply a better use of my time for the task at hand. I'll cheerfully read the latter on my own time, but not in preparation for an interview. I don't see this culture changing anytime soon. 1) it's difficult to make an industry-wide shift and 2) more crucially, no-one has found a better way of doing it. It'll be interesting to watch though.