Disclaimer: I've done more than 60 interviews at Amazon. My views are my own. When we ask DSA questions we don't care about the data structures or algorithms.

Disclaimer: I've done more than 60 interviews at Amazon. My views are my own. When we ask DSA questions we don't care about the data structures or algorithms. We care about the logical reasoning and problem solving skills that enable you to solve those problems. We contrive particular questions to give you chances to showcase those underlying skills. If candidates can get through an interview by memorizing problems from Leetcode or HackerRank then the interview process isn't working. Most companies miss the mark on this.[1] Sometimes I ask a question and the candidate recites an optimal solution in 2 minutes. Great, they got an optimal answer. But it's useless for me — I didn't get any data to inform my hiring decision. Maybe they created the solution from scratch using strong logical reasoning and problem solving skills. Or maybe they saw that exact problem the day before when prepping for the interview. Without digging deeper it's impossible to know. In these situations it's the interviewer's job to gather more data. Sidenote: If you've seen the same question recently it's better to tell the interviewer. If you pretend that you're solving it from scratch your interviewer can probably tell. And if they don't notice you'll just get harder questions later in the interview that you'll probably strike out on [1] Gayle McDowell has a lot of insight on how to conduct effective coding interviews if you're looking to improve your company's process.