Hate the game. The reality is: Yes, polished/prepped interviewers will do better on common interview puzzles. Speaking as an interviewer. How did we get here?

Hate the game. The reality is: Yes, polished/prepped interviewers will do better on common interview puzzles. Speaking as an interviewer. How did we get here? Competition and survivor bias. Bar raising at the FAANGs lead to irrelevant algorithm and data structure puzzles in the interview. Now it's common place industry wide. Now it's gamified with leetcode and cracking the coding interview. Cracking the coding interview has a interesting blurb about how common this exact tactic is in an acquihire deal. It's not uncommon for all "real work" to stop so engineering can prep for interview s. Let that sink in. It means you're likely to get rusty on silly interview puzzles if you've been doing real work for to long.