Your story reminds me of when I interviewed at Google and did great on four interviews but the fifth one sunk me. I was asked an inheritance question which didn

Your story reminds me of when I interviewed at Google and did great on four interviews but the fifth one sunk me. I was asked an inheritance question which didn't make much sense (coming from a heavy Perl and Ruby background) but probably would have made more sense if I were a heavy C++ developer. I explained how the question wasn't really an issue in Ruby but the interviewer didn't like that and angrily said "you should have learned this in your compilers class at Georgia Tech!" I'm glad that the interviewer read my resume closely to learn my alma mater, but not closely enough to realize I had a biology degree from it. I tried again a year later and got luckier with my allocation of interviewers. I never did end up using any algorithms there.