The patterns _can_ have a hold. It's always fun to optimize slow engines, but it always feel more to me like rote/busy work than actually building the system fr

The patterns _can_ have a hold. It's always fun to optimize slow engines, but it always feel more to me like rote/busy work than actually building the system from scratch and engaging in product engineering. But, I guess that's kinda your point -- very simple solutions that revolve around simple, common core structures can lead to huge leaps in improvement. But this kind of real world optimization has medium breadth and depth. It's got a lot more breadth than many algo interviews I've gotten, and yet less depth. I've found that's been the real structural weakness in weak algo interviews I've had -- they just overindex on deep knowledge of algo optimization and underindex on communication, reading and design ability. I'm drawing from a pretty small and outdated sample, though; the last time I had the patience to interview with a BigCo was more than five years ago.