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I realize that the study was specifically talking about brainteasers, but I wonder if irrelevant algorithm questions have a similar motivation? I was once asked

I realize that the study was specifically talking about brainteasers, but I wonder if irrelevant algorithm questions have a similar motivation? I was once asked at an interview at a FAANG company to come up with an algo for finding the longest palindromic subsequence (!). At another I was asked to get all partitions of an integer (https://www.whitman.edu/mathematics/cgt_online/book/section03.03.html https://www.whitman.edu/mathematics/cgt_online/book/section0...). I'm pretty certain I'd never be working on problems of that nature as part of the role.

repsilat 8y ago
> an algo for finding the longest palindromic subsequence (!) Not irrelevant to my professional career, to be honest. There have been a few situations where being able to see a tricky, unfamiliar problem and after some thought say, "oh, we can use a DP algo for that" has saved a large amount of future headache. Only a small fraction of people on the team need to have that skill (more in some teams than others, too) so I don't think it's a great thing to test for (much less require), but it's actually a pretty valuable skill in my experience.