> Of course, you should already know basic data structures That's partly what the whiteboards are screening for. Any decent CS program should teach them. > I

> Of course, you should already know basic data structures That's partly what the whiteboards are screening for. Any decent CS program should teach them. > I had a FAANG interview question applying statistics to a unbounded input. It took me a while to understand what the question was really asking, followed by some shock because it was something I'd never even imagined before (since I haven't needed to do much statistics in my line of work) and I didn't have the faintest idea where to start. With some hand-holding I figured out some basics, but I'm pretty sure that interview was part of the reason that "the hire signal was not strong enough". Yeah, if you are asking something weird (as an interviewer) you should be expected to explain it. It sounds to me you had the right approach (figuring out what the problem is and getting help from the interviewer). Ultimately, it's completely possible you simply stumbled upon a bad interviewer who assumed his specialty question was well known.