I'm not exactly a gifted programmer or anything but a BFS seems pretty reasonable in an interview depending upon the amount of rigor / efficiency being demanded

I'm not exactly a gifted programmer or anything but a BFS seems pretty reasonable in an interview depending upon the amount of rigor / efficiency being demanded. I remember doing it for one of my very first interviews where I was asked to implement a website crawler and hold onto URLs. Having written a lot of them while trying to scrape sites for info before every other site had an API, this was super fast for me and was a very practical problem. It's not like they're asking for a topological sort of a graph where you can use Prim v. Kruskal and now you have to make sure you remember that near the neurons that activated your memory of your 3rd week of sophomore year 2nd semester when you had a really nasty cold. If you haven't heard of breadth-first v. depth-first that should be simple. I do this problem constantly on my laptop when I'm looking for files and start getting annoyed at how long a search is taking. You start applying -maxdepth to a find command and fumble through directories perhaps and do a for loop. This is how I wind up doing a crude variant of k means clustering using cut, sort, uniq, and some creative use of awk when trawling through a bunch of log files. But I do feel that anyone pretty serious about programming as a career understands there's little to be gained by more or less bitching about the state of hiring and a lot more to be gained by spending a few hours or so working on some problem sets occasionally. We're all busy and have to keep our technical knowledge up to date of course, but almost every well paid professional has to do this (doctors and lawyers are required to do this to even practice, in fact). I don't bother interviewing for FAANGS because my brain's fried and burn-out makes working on interview prep an order magnitude harder, but I don't go around blaming everyone for acting in their own self interest either.