Check out some of Dan Luu's writing. https://danluu.com/algorithms-interviews/ https://danluu.com/algorithms-interviews/ comes to mind: > At the start of this

Check out some of Dan Luu's writing. https://danluu.com/algorithms-interviews/ https://danluu.com/algorithms-interviews/ comes to mind: > At the start of this post, we noted that people at big tech companies commonly claim that they have to do algorithms interviews since it's so costly to have inefficiencies at scale. My experience is that these examples are legion at every company I've worked for that does algorithms interviews. Trying to get people to solve algorithms problems on the job by asking algorithms questions in interviews doesn't work. He goes on to talk about why this happens. In my own experience [edit to clarify: not at Microsoft], if you lay out a piece of code as an algorithm problem that needs to be optimized, most folks will make short work of it. But it's quite common for folks to not realize something will be slow enough that they need to apply that kind of thinking. That's especially true if part of the algorithm is hidden behind some indirection: whether just a function call, a call into a library that feels "far away" in the codebase / is owned by a different team, or dependency injection.